Advice appreciated

patanne

I think you will find that she is still telling you less than the full story. If she is not paying debt payments whilst she buys things for other members of the family, then I expect that she has totally trashed her credit worthiness & the one you know about is not a mistake at all. I would not normally advocate the telling of a lie but think that you need to protect yourself. I suggest that next time your overdraft gets to £500 you tell your mother it is £600 and continue to do that until you are not overdrawn. Otherwise you are going to find that she has trashed yours too. I appreciate that you are trying to help her and probably wouldn't be able to say no to her anyway, but please take care and I don't just mean financially.

chevalier

I understand that this must be a chaotic way to live. So before you get totally resentful about it can I suggest the following?

1) Check whether any of the online shops deliver to your area. I would guess for the 2 of you about 200 pounds a month should be enough for groceries. What is your spend? If you order online then you can down grade brands and make savings that way.

If none of them deliver to your area, then I would suggest that you both put away money each week so that once a month you can do a monthly shop at somewhere like T*sco or similar to take advantage of those bulk buys.

Can you inventory what food you do have and live off this for a couple of weeks to get the grocery budget started?

2) The order for paying things is
mortgage/ other secured lending (eg the car loan)
council tax
gas and electric
food
water
insurances
AND THEN non secured lenders.

If you can't pay the last ones then you have a problem. And I suggest that you do the debt remedy on the Stepchange website for advice on what to do.

3) Utilities and insurances - when was the last time that you switched these? If more than a few years, then chances are that you are paying too much. Also with electric you need to be energy savvy, so lights of when not in the room, appliances (except fridge/freezer) switched off at the wall, charging your phones at work.....

4) You both need to work out what bills each of you have and what day they need to be paid on. Alot of companies will change the date a direct debit comes out if you ask them, so maybe arrange for one or two to come out each week. Would that help with the budgetting?

5) Once you know what your outgoings are (AND YOUR MUM WILL NEED TO BE TOTALLY HONEST HERE, NO MORE HIDING STUFF), then you can plan how much you need to put away each week.

So if you know you will have a 100 electric bill in week 3 then you need to save 33 a week to pay for it. That way you don't (if like you, you are weekly paid), spend all of say weeks one money because you have no bills that week. Likewise you can say to your mum, I can't give you x this week because I am saving up to the xyz bill in week 3.

You are being very kind to your mum. But it is not helping her at all.

You and her need to do a budget. If hers doesn't balance then she needs to cut back AND talk to Stepchange.

Oh and your dad is taking the pee. He must be laughing so much behind your back. Put all HIS debts on a joint mortgage and leave, and take himself off the mortgage. What a clever scam. Especially if he bought those debts with him into the marriage. That is worse. He has a moral repsonsibility to pay that money back, but I doubt you will see any of it.

good luck
chev

DCFC79

Its very wrong what your father has done OP ( yes thats you skint sausage ), not taking responsibility for his debts for a start. You have been helpful to your mum but you need to do tangle yourself from the mess.

What is it you don't quite understand with the SOA ?

bess1234_2

Step change has anonymous help on its website. Show your mum how to budget, then lead your own life. You can help in the clever stuff, like transfers and ppi, and getting best deals. but it's your mums budget. If you paid her a fixed sum, it could help her. Paying your dad's debts and uncles flights off is not your responsibility. Or hers, but that's her battle.

Sounds like you do need clarity and simplicity. Do your mums budget based on what you spend now, then you can look how to cut back. Then it starts becoming clearer. It will separate living costs from debts, which I think is where the chaos is. I suspect the chaos is masking a mess, so the simpler the better. And it could be worse than you think. The credit rating thing isn't ringing true, but it's irrelevant how bad it is. The steps forward is the important thing.

It's up to your mum if she posts her soa here. People can rip into them, in order to help, but if she's not up to that, she needs one for herself. How about doing yours to start with? Figure out your contribution, and do your own budget. Start helping your mum learn how to do it, but keep yourself separate. And take care. It's not right that it's all falling on your shoulders x

19lottie82

Hi OP, I'm sorry if I seemed harsh in my previous post, I wasn't seeing the bigger picture here.

I agree with the other posters. You need to work out a realistic figure (1/2 all bills + an amount for "rent") and give this to your Mum every month. After that, no more. You're not helping her (or yourself) by giving her sporadic payments whenever she asks.

Tell your Mum you can help her if she will let you, but I appreciate it may be hard for her to tell you every detail of her debt / finances as she is your Mother!

If your Mum wont let you help her, then there is not much you can do I'm afraid. Where do you want to be in 10 years time, in terms of living arrangements and your finances? What would you do if you met a partner in the foreseeable future and wanted to set up a home with them, could you leave your Mother?

As someone else has advised, you really need to separate your finances from your Mothers, it's not healthy.

19lottie82

skint_sausage wrote: »

I'll
we had flooding problems so I paid for a completely new floor for one of the rooms..

I don't understand this, I thought if you have a mortgage you legally had to have buildings insurance, which would cover this sort of thing?

dancingfairy

it sounds like she has been left in a big mess by her ex husband. It sounds like she is getting in more and more debt and dragging your down with her at the moment.
She needs to do the SOA as follows:
1) her income
2) your contribution to the bills
and include all the household bills that need to be paid. (apart from any
minor ones such as you mobile/your car that you have agreed to pay from your money).

She needs to make sure that they are paid in order of priority as Chev said earlier ie mortgage, gas, electric, food and then unsecured debts. If she can't manage to make the minimum payments on the debts when taking into account the money you are giving her then she needs to get some help from someone like National Debtline, StepCHange or her local CAB.
df
Edit: you will be fine once you know exactly what you are required to the household bills and can budget around that (from what I can tell).
You mum needs to get some help. She needs to really be completely honest with you and/or get some proper help. If she can't do that then you may need to make some hard decision about whether to refuse to pay for things (above whatever amount you've agreed) or whether you need to move out. Very, very tricky.

dancingfairy

O.K so here's an example which may help you.
Your mum brings 1,200 into the house each month and you contribute 800 a month so the total income into the house is 2,000.
Your regular bills (mortgage,gas,electric, food and essentials) comes to say 1,400 this would leave 600 to pay towards credit cards and unsecured loans (obviously this is fictitious example and your numbers will differ).
If the minimum payments on the credit cards and loans is 800 pounds then you are 200 a month short every month (and getting 200 a month more in debt). You would then have various options - ie contribute more to the household, get a second job, your mum get a second job, see where you can cut down and/or seek help from StepChange,National Debtline or CAB with regards to setting up some kind of payment arrangement with your creditors.
If the SOA says you have money spare at the end of the month (the very bottom figure) then this suggests that either you haven't done the SOA properly or it's a question of budgetting better (and sticking to whats on the plan) or you could manage fine if your mum didn't randomly decide to pay 500 for a pram.
Hopefully your soa shows a surplus each month?
df

dancingfairy

It sounds like she is being swamped by a combinsation of having a very large mortgage and being too proud to accept that she hasn't got large sums of money to support her children.
df

19lottie82

sausage, from the sounds of it your mum is very lucky to have you.

The most important thing is to put together a realistic budget and stick to it.

If things are really bad in terms of your mums debt and she still can't see the light at the end of the tunnel after preparing a strict but manageable budget, please consider contacting a debt charity, there is no shame in it, that's what they are there for!

And I know we have told you this but if your mum won't let you help her, there's not really a lot you can do, so please don't throw away the best part of your youth trying to accomplish something that will never happen, you'll only live to regret it.

Saying that I hope your Mum does have her "light Bulb moment" as we say on MSE, and remember if you need any emotional or practical support feel free to come on here and post.

Good luck!