Large Debts £42k - I wasn't worried but I am now!

The replies you've had so far are well meaning but let's face it, your problem here is that your debt burden is insupportably huge compared to your incomes.

As a quick rule of thumb, anyone whose debts exceed their gross income is in bl00dy trouble.

You said you made about £1,500 a month and the missus £800-odd. I make it that your gross earnings must be about £25,000pa, and hers about £13,000. So you have debts of £42,000 but gross annual earnings of only £38,000.

That's the problem right there, matey. In monthly terms, it means that your minimum expenses already exceed your income by £350 a month. Including the interest that's accumulating, you are getting in deeper at a rate of well over £4,000 a year. Your incomes are not going up by £4,000 a year, are they? No, thought not - so holding out for pay rises, chipping away at the gas bill, and shopping at Netto aren't going to solve a problem on this scale. Even if they were, are you really going to sit home for the next 15 years eating Netto baked beans and living like a hermit? I don't think so.

You need to step back from the situation and restructure your financial life, IMHO, otherwise you aren't going to get out of this one.

If your house is worth £140,000, sell it and collect the £20,000 equity. Please don't get hung up on the idea that renting is 'money down the drain'. It is not. When you rent a house, you rent it for roughly 5% of its value. When you buy a house, what you rent is the money that buys it - also at about 5% a year. It's exactly the same thing, with the only difference being that until recently, houses appreciated a bit.

You'll have say £15,000, after costs and early redemption fees. Use £14,000 of that to clear your Morgan Stanley, Halifax, and HSBC debts. Use the rest as a deposit to rent an identical property to what you have now. On current rental yields of about 5%, a £140,000 house will rent for about £600 a month.

Doing this will roughly halve your credit card outgoings and renting will save you £168 versus the mortgage. So you are £500 a month better off.

Next, cancel or freeze your pension and life / CI insurance arrangements. You cannot afford to budget for crises that may happen in the future, when you are facing a genuine one which is maturing rapidly right now. You are young enough to resume these later in life. And if your car is worth £1,000 or so then make sure you have third party or at most TPFT insurance on it. After allowing for the excess, comprehensive only gives you a few hundred quid in benfits and is probably quite a lot pricier.

That's another £100 saved.

Now you can start thinking about micro-savings: managing expenses better; cashback credit cards (paid off every month) for day to day spending, eating German groceries from Netto, freebies from work (stationery, phone calls, etc) and so on.

You thus go from being £350 a month underwater to being £300 or so per month in surplus. That surplus goes towards your debts, the worst first. Don't get preoccupied with paying off individual cards. Cards are just a vehicle for debt. Attack and kill the worst interest rate first.

Once you've done all that, you have done all you can to reduce costs. Your only remaining line of attack is to start earning more money. You need to be completely focused on this. Will selling stuff on eBay make you more than kissing @rse at work? If so, do the former rather than the latter. Are you in your dream job? If not, why aren't you looking for it? Very few people on good money got there by being unionised or lucky. Most people got there by identifying the most lucrative career path open to them and relentlessly pursuing it. Many people who are skint have never ever done this and regard their career as something that happens to them rather than as something they could have influenced. Also, why does the wife only make half the national average wage?

After a year of the above you'll have gone from being £42,000 in debt to being about £24,000 in debt. The steady reduction in the minimum payments you have to find, and the likely steady but unspectacular improvement in your earnings, will means you can squeeze this debt harder over the next few years.

Incidentally your situation is not discreditable to you. Up to your bottom in debt you may be, but at least it's from specific things that are unavoidably costly - student loan, buying a house, getting married. Most people who do those things go into the red from doing them, so a bit of debt is not unreasonable. You've just let it get a bit out of hand - but it is fixable. Being in debt is like being fat - it takes a long time to get tha way and it takes an equally long time to reverse it.

Best of luck.