The Feeling of a Lightbulb Moment

Verbatim

Don't think I've had mine!

I always paid off my credit cards every month and have never paid a penny in interest and have not had a loan and have always been careful with savings etc.

Then

We decided to get a load of improvemrnts to the house as we were then in a financial position to do so. Mortgage was paid and I had £35k savings earmarked for the project (plus about £10k emergency and tax fund) and took out an £80k mortgage to cover the rest. This wasn't enough but we didn't want a bigger mortgage so I thought I'd use 0% cards and tart until I'd paid them off.

(This I've managed to do well enough as my signature shows but has caused me huge worry and stress and as some of you will know led to or hastened heart problems for which I had surgery last month. All well now I'm so thankful to say).

OH then lost first one and then another major client so our income plummeted. My tax bill, which I expected to be £5k was nearly £12k and our daughter had one more year of school fees to be funded, year 13 A levels and we decided to prioritize her.

So I've always felt a bit of a fraud on here but I'm certainly doing the shopping challenges and have cut down and taken on hosting foreign students to help with the bills. Although nowhere near back to previous income levels which were high by anyone's standards we have only one more set of school fees to pay and only 1 cc debt and we think that OH's contracts are good for at least a year.

BUT we do have some major expenses to fund in the next few months, some of which are totally unexpected. So we are not out of the woods yet.

dinkylou

I can relate to what Sarah and Twon are saying on here.

For me, it started a while ago when a friend sent me the 'tips' email. I looked at the site and in the back of my mind I knew that I had been overspending for a while but at that point it wasnt hurting me (ie. was in overdraft every month but was paying debts happily).

I saw a post on here about writing everything down on a spreadsheet and used Martin's as a guide. It was then that I saw how bad things really were but the bulb was still not quite on full wattage.

For me, the full watt 'ping' was when I then went on to the snowball calculator (https://www.whatsthecost.com/aspx) and then I saw that I would be in debt for a futher 10 years unless I sorted things out.

From there on there was a state of panic and distress for a while and then after a number of months, some serious looking at spending and some cutting back, things started to look a little better. So it kind of kind of dawned on me slowly but I'm so thankful that it came.

GettingThingsDone

Yes - definitely felt a panic, but then a feeling of being in control

Richard_S

Hi LookingAhead,

A very thought provoking thread.

Over the last twenty years we have bought, run and sold successful businesses, worked in reasonably well paid jobs, borrowed and repaid large amounts of business related debt (up to £350k), got ourselves into financial difficulty and out again, prospered again, spent an absolute fortune on frivolous purchases and partying and really enjoying the best life has to offer.

Scroll forward to Jan 2006 and a conversation with a CCCS advisor. The realisation that there was a deficit between assets and liabilities of somewhere in the region of £250k, with all our former income streams as dry as a desert and the words “you have no realistic option but to declare or accept bankruptcy” hit me like a blow from a heavy weight boxer. I knew the guy was right but had failed to admit to myself that this time there was no way out.

I felt physically sick, light headed, dizzy, and literally as though I was going to collapse. My head was pounding like a jack hammer and I spent the next two hours in a state of utter mental confusion sprawled out on the sofa wondering how the hell I’d managed to get into such a financial Armageddon. That was certainly the moment the “light bulb” got turned on for me; that evening I sat down with my O.H and related the conversation to her.

During the course of a very emotional and tearful couple of hours we mapped out the bones of a plan setting out what our objectives would be for the next 6months, 12 months and 3years. The following day I rang some friends to accept an offer of staying in their villa in Spain for a week that we had previously declined. We could barely scrape together the money for the flights and car hire but that week certainly gave us the breathing space to finalise our plans and accept what was a new reality.

Within six months we had lost our house, cars, investments and been declared bankrupt; back to square one but still laughing and having fun - just more modestly. :rotfl: