Help Please!

Fire_Fox

Quincifer wrote: »

Hey,

Right in reply to some of your questions/queries -

• The amount of Housing Benefit I am entitled to (being 24) is £48 per week/£192 per month. This is because being under 25 means I am only entitled to the Shared Room Rate and not 1 Bedroom Rate (Basically the assumption that I should be sharing with someone else and therefore not have as much rent to pay). This, along with my JSA of £50.95 per week/£203.80 per month gives me £395.80 per month income.
• My rent at the moment is £175 (for the next 3 months payments), as I said I am exempt from Council Tax due to the above and I then have electricity (approx £40), water (approx £15), tv licence (approx £35 quarterly), contents insurance (approx £12), telephone (£18), internet (£10) and my mobile phone (£40). I have rung all the utility companies already to try to postpone/lower my payments and all of them have said no. Basically, you have to get in debt to them first before they can sort something out!! (seems silly to me when I am already aware of my situation)
• I know someone will ask about my mobile bill, basically I have it high because my family live abroad so I have an international call tarriff added on, plus my partner lives in scotland so I have unlimited texts so I can keep in contact with him too.
• So add the above to £135 for my loan and that is more than I have coming in, before food and money I will need to get to interviews etc.

This isn't a lightbulb moment, I have had that before and have already taken the action to sort out and pay my debt and everything so I don't think digging out all my bills etc to work out interest rates and do an SOA is what I need right now.
I just really want some advice on what I can do/sell/etc to get a bit of money in now to cover things. The council are dragging their feet with my Housing Benefit and I don't know when they will be paying it to me, so I don't think I'll be covered for my next loan payment - thats why I need some advice.

xxx

I wish you all the best in your interview. :j

The reason we wanted the Statement of Affairs is to advise you as you asked us to do: but you have given us the basics as above anyway. The advice given may not be what you were expecting/ wanting but it is sound advice based on a combined experience of many many years of living with debts and dealing with creditors.

You are scrabbling about to find money to pay this month's payments but you aren't thinking any further ahead. You have just £400 a month coming in and your rent is soon to go back up to £350. You won't be able to manage that, so you must set aside money at this stage or you may well end up defaulting on everything, being harrassed by creditors and not having any money to eat into the bargain. If I was your landlord I'd be almighty p***d off if I found you were waiting on housing benefit to pay your loan and not your (half price) rent. :eek:

1. Electricity is too high - mine was £26 a month all last year and only £34 to cover the winter. You need to start reading the meter regularly and turning everything off - killers are anything that creates heat: hot water, washing machine, tumble dryer etc. There is a great thread on the Green board to give you crazy ideas of how to cut back to almost nothing. Also check if you are on a standing charge tariff or not.

2. Water is also very high - are you metered? Are you getting a single person discount if not? We pay £20 a quarter split between two.

3. Contents insurance - consider cancelling. I know that isn't ideal, but you must be able to pay your rent and eat.

4. Consider getting rid of the TV license (poss sell TV too) and just watch iPlayer and 4 On Demand. If you don't watch live streaming you don't legally need a TV license. Or keep the TV and cancel the internet - use the council library/ job centre for free internet access.

5. Telecoms - you do not need a mobile phone PLUS a landline for one person: this alone is costing £58 a month or £700 a year. At the very least cancel any extras you are paying for, get down to the cheapest possible package. At the end of the day it's between this option or risking getting cut off altogether AND ruining your credit rating. You can e-mail your partner and family, even send texts for free on some websites. They also have the option of contacting you for the next month or two, then you can 'pay them back' by making all the calls when you can afford to.

6. Loan - seriously this is not a priority debt, stop paying it and send a token payment with an explanatory letter. You must be able to pay your rent, council tax, utilities and eat going forwards. You won't get paid for a month after you start work and you will have travel expenses, how are you going to manage?

Quincifer

lopacka wrote: »

just a thougt but if you just pay 50% of your rent ,, and you get housing benefit for 100% ,, be carefull or you have an overpayment in housing benefit for 3 month :-))

Yeah I know, the way that they work out their Local Housing Allowance is that regardless of how much your rent is you will get £48/week unless this adds up to £15/month more than you are paying in rent and if it does then they drop it. Turns out from a letter today that I will get £46.15/week so they have dropped it slightly to cover that. Thanks though!
I also found out today that I would be entitled to £15/week more in JSA....if I was 25 not 24!! Words can't explain how infuriated I am at the age limit for benefit entitlements! :mad:

Fire_Fox wrote: »

You are scrabbling about to find money to pay this month's payments but you aren't thinking any further ahead. You have just £400 a month coming in and your rent is soon to go back up to £350. You won't be able to manage that, so you must set aside money at this stage or you may well end up defaulting on everything, being harrassed by creditors and not having any money to eat into the bargain. If I was your landlord I'd be almighty p***d off if I found you were waiting on housing benefit to pay your loan and not your (half price) rent. :eek:

1. Electricity is too high - mine was £26 a month all last year and only £34 to cover the winter. You need to start reading the meter regularly and turning everything off - killers are anything that creates heat: hot water, washing machine, tumble dryer etc. There is a great thread on the Green board to give you crazy ideas of how to cut back to almost nothing. Also check if you are on a standing charge tariff or not.

2. Water is also very high - are you metered? Are you getting a single person discount if not? We pay £20 a quarter split between two.

3. Contents insurance - consider cancelling. I know that isn't ideal, but you must be able to pay your rent and eat.

4. Consider getting rid of the TV license (poss sell TV too) and just watch iPlayer and 4 On Demand. If you don't watch live streaming you don't.........

Please don't think I'm using Housing Benefit just for the loan!!! Having the loan is the reason I'm on here asking for help, not why i'm claiming!! The Housing Benefit + JSA just covers my normal outgoings (well, with a bit of tweaking). If I was debt free I would still be claiming Housing Benefit and I would still have asked him to drop my rent as I would still have bills and rent to pay!
For the record, when I asked my landlord about halving my rent I made him fully aware that I have personal debts which I am trying to pay off aswell as my normal outgoings.

Electricity - I don't have a washing machine, tumble dryer or dishwasher and my oven is all electric. I don't have central heating as it is an old property so unfortunately I have to use electric wall heaters, and I have sash windows which lose me alot of heat before I even put the heaters on. I can promise you that everything is switched off at the wall (except my fridge and freezer) at all times when it isn't being used, this is something i've done ever since i've had my own place (and I use energy-saving lightbulbs too). I read my meter regularly and sort it all online so it shows me my usage too. I'll have a further look into it though.

Water - I rang them about it last week actually. I am not metered but after doing their online calculator it worked out that being metered would cost me more and thats what the guy on the phone said too! I wasn't aware they did a Single Person Discount though so I will ring them about it tomorrow.

Contents Insurance - I'd rather not cancel it if I can help it, I don't have a burglar alarm, I'm not in a neighbourhood watch area and I have had previous situations where people have tried to kick in the front door to the building.

All The Telecomms Stuff - I had a look into it today and realised I can knock my internet down a tariff to save me £5 a month so will be doing that tomorrow too. As for the phone stuff, well I know that my mobile is something I could spend less on. My landline costs me nothing in calls (on the free evening + weekend package) as I only have it for the internet and my parents use it to ring me from abroad. I tried to change my tv licence to monthly from quarterly to make it easier for me to manage in the long run but you have to do a 6month in advance payment thing where it costs you £23 a month at first so thats out the window at the moment.

I'm in the process of drafting a letter to the bank from that template which 10past6 suggested so hopefully that might sort something. When I went into the bank the woman I saw did say she was going to forward my details to their Debt Management Team, but i'm not going to take my chances.

---

I don't know whether this is just me being paranoid but I feel a little patronised on here. Is it because I'm young?
I have been criticised for having asked my landlord to drop my rent, yet it is the advice I was given from Citizens Advice and the Council?!
It probably is just me being paranoid, I'm losing the will to carry on with all this after 4 months of applying for jobs and today being exactly 5 weeks unemployed, its killing me having nothing to do. To show just how hard it is to get a job up here at the moment - A friend of mine applied for a job in the local library (amongst dozens others, she was in the same boat as me) and got through to the shortlisting...only to find that 200 people had also got through from almost 500 applications. She didn't get it.
Anyone got a winning lottery ticket going spare??

Merlinexcalibur

I don't know whether this is just me being paranoid but I feel a little patronised on here. Is it because I'm young?

No. I think it's mostly because people on MSE have lived, experienced things. No can't be bothered. Anymore. With this crap.

Fire_Fox

Quincifer wrote: »

Please don't think I'm using Housing Benefit just for the loan!!! Having the loan is the reason I'm on here asking for help, not why i'm claiming!!

The Housing Benefit + JSA just covers my normal outgoings (well, with a bit of tweaking). If I was debt free I would still be claiming Housing Benefit and I would still have asked him to drop my rent as I would still have bills and rent to pay!

I don't know whether this is just me being paranoid but I feel a little patronised on here. Is it because I'm young?
I have been criticised for having asked my landlord to drop my rent, yet it is the advice I was given from Citizens Advice and the Council?!
It probably is just me being paranoid, I'm losing the will to carry on with all this after 4 months of applying for jobs and today being exactly 5 weeks unemployed, its killing me having nothing to do. To show just how hard it is to get a job up here at the moment - A friend of mine applied for a job in the local library (amongst dozens others, she was in the same boat as me) and got through to the shortlisting...only to find that 200 people had also got through from almost 500 applications. She didn't get it.
Anyone got a winning lottery ticket going spare??

I'm sorry you feel we haven't been as supportive as you'd hoped. You come across as a really genuine person, and it's clear you are a victim of circumstance. I think it's sh*t that you aren't entitled to money you'd get if this were happening a few months down the line. I also have no doubt at all that you are trying to find work, but it's a very slow time. You have an interview, which is ace! :beer:

What I have noticed on this board is when the regulars can sense someone is on the brink of getting into a very big mess and they/ we can be a bit firmer than with the ones who are already there and are in it for the long haul. The classic mistake that a lot of us make is to start shuffling money around meeting payments by the skin of our teeth, until one month the whole house of cards falls down and we default on loads of things at once.

Are you doing any surveys/ matched betting/ daily clicks and scratchcards yet?

gettingbetter

hi quin

i second what fire fox and merlin said
we can only give you advice based on our own experience and what we have picked up on here

kas xx

Quincifer

Yeah I know, I'm not meaning to be critical because I really appreciate what people are doing by even taking the time to reply!
It's just one of those circumstances that I think you get really caught up in (obviously, because it affects day-to-day life), and I think because I don't have a lifeline as such that I can just grab onto and it'll pull me out, I panic.

I've been on here 3 years and have received lots of (and given my fair share of) advice over that time but (like you said Fire Fox) i'm a victim of circumstance. I just wasn't prepared for a situation that I didn't even consider! (if that makes sense)

I hope my previous vent hasn't offended! I do appreciate the advice everyone has given and it has helped alot in the matter of hours since I first said anything, I think sometimes you just need to get it off your chest!!!! THANKYOU!!

Another update - I do the emailed surveys with a few companies and have been keeping up-to-date with them, and have a mystery shop to do this week too - every penny counts!
Oh and i've been rolling through the competitions board for a boredom killer so fingers crossed to that too.

xx

gettingbetter

quin

i think you will find that most of us dont take offense
we are all thick skinned

vent all you like it does help

good luck with surveys and comps

kas xx

GeorgeUK

Fingers and everything else crossed for you.

Have you tried any temping agencies? I know this plays havoc with the benefits, but have you signed up with any for permanent positions rather than temp work?

For the loan, did you have PPI cover?

Just curious, how long until you're 25?

bank_of_slate

Quincifer wrote: »

Oh and P.S.....

I have an interview on thursday for a local job, full-time with a good salary so fingers crossed for me!!!

:T:T:T:T:T
All the best of luck for the interview!
Brush up on the company to show them that you're knowledgeable!

Try to think of examples where you have dealt with projects or situations which are relevant to this job.

...Linda xx

firesidemaid

hello!

just a couple of thoughts again:rolleyes:.

you say your parents ring you on your landline - can your partner not do that also, to save you money at the moment.

you can now get mega mobile phone deals - see the phones board, or have a look through this site and quidco. tonnes of texts and mins for £20/£25 max a month.

can either your partner or parents help you out a little till you get a job again?

think about where you would like to work - see if you can volunteer and then make yourself indispensable! here's hoping you will get this job. if you don't, then make it your job to go in every place possible to see if there any vacancies - i always think supermarkets and cafes/bakeries/food places are best as you will gain from likely free food! also if you work in somewhere like mcdonalds, you can collect the unused free coffee vouchers and sell them on ebay.

when you get contents insurance again, you can probably get it for as little as £5 a month - again, use the section on this site.

good luck x