Advice Please

IvaWinnaLotto

Hi, I hope that someone can give me some advice. I'm still waiting to hear back from CCCS but I doubt that they can help me so I am trying to figure out our options as best we can, as our situation is quite complicated.

For starters, my husband earns about 16,000 a year + 2,000 in child tax credits - pay £300-ish a month on our mortgage (it used to be £220 a month but we stupidly opted for a cheaper Xmas as we were struggling and since we have a flexi-mortage we spread the cost throughout the rest of the year)

I currently don't work and stay at home taking care of our child however am currently looking for weekend/evening work, so that should help. Until recently I was self-employed and worked from home, but didn't really earn any money so I sold my business (albeit for just a few thousand)

We've decided that we want to sell our house to give ourselves a fresh start and we are using my business sale money to fix up the house where things are needing fixed to hopefully boost the profit.

Our mortage is currently £40,000 and if we don't fix up our home we may be get £50-£55,000 for it, but if we do put our few thousand from the business sale we should get £65-£70,000 for it.

Here is where it gets a bit complicated:
Last year we consolidated our debts and now have a £20,000 secured loan on our house. Life seemed good - we thought the problem was solved but it is now much worse. We ALSO are responsible for paying a loan which is in my Father-in-law's name and which was from when my husband couldn't get credit on his own. It was for a co-signed car, but for some reason only my FIL's name is on the loan (and yes, this loan goes back to my husband's bachelor days when he used to have a nice disposable income but unfortuntely things changed) - we have about £15000 left to pay and are needing to pay £450 a month. add that up with our £120/month secured (which we could normally afford) £320/mortgage etc on a £1,100/month take home salary (+ smatterings of child tax credit which we make sure we spend on our child .. food, nappies, etc...) its not good.

And to make things worse, we've been relying on the credit cards and over-drafts which we originally consolidated last year in order to be able to make payment to the loan in FILs name. He gets very upset with us if we don't pay it and is very unsympathetic towards our situation and unwilling to help (quite possibly he doesn't have the money either) - so now once again we have £6,000 debt in overdrafts and £6000 in credit cards just to be able to afford the loan - we've tried getting the loan lowered or transferred over to our name, but to no success. We also have £1000 charged to catalogues for necessities such as clothing which we could otherwise not afford.

I KNOW that I am needing to work and am actively looking but when we sell the house, it may or may not pay off the remainder of the secured loan. I am really upset now that we have this loan, becaues ideally I would like to use the house profit to pay off the loan to FIL (as I already know that CCCS can't help us with that) - we've been considering bankruptcy but again, that would do nothing to solve the problem with FILs loan, and of course, we would wish to sell the house ourselves before doing so, as we think we could get more for it and clear more debt with the sale.

Our credit cards are now currently maxed out again and I am ebaying off all of our non-essential belongings (things that we no longer use or need or could happily live without) We cancelled our Sky, mobiles, are also looking to switch phone etc. I've started meal-planning and planning our grocery shops in advance etc...

We've been living quite frugally of late and now know that we could quite happily live this way.. loan and credit card free, but first we need rid of all of this debt. Any advice would be appreciated and I feel utterly humilated that things have gotten this bad

Toto

Well first of all, welcome to the board. I am far too new at this to offer any real help, there are much better people than me, who will be along in a bit. They will ask you to post a SOA which you can find on this thread

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=107280

But, I'll send you a cyber hug, it feels good to get it all off your chest and the folks here are great, they will really stop you from feeling alone with this.

Toto

I do have one? though. What kind of car was it and is it worth selling? 15k seems an awful lot to have outstanding on an old loan for a car. Could you not sell the car and pay that off at least a portion of your FILs loan? Just a thought.

IvaWinnaLotto

Hi and thanks for the welcome

Ah, the car! That is whole different story

We no longer have the car as it was totalled completely in a car accident - we were sitting in a traffic jam on the motorway (yes, litterally just sitting there as traffic was at a stand still) when we were hit by a speeding car going 60mph. The insurance paid off part of part of it, but refused to pay all. So we're still stuck paying it off even though we've since acquired a used car worth about £3,000 which we are looking at trading in/selling as well

In retrospect all of our problems started during the car accident

lynzpower

pop up an SOA and lets see whats what. IM sure once we see that we will be able to offer more.

Incidentally, dont forget to check out the jobcentreplus website for jobs, many overlook this, but in my experience there are shed loads of evening & weekend jobs on there