It is amazing how easy it is to get into debt, it doesn’t happen over night but once it starts happening things seem to go into a downward spiral making it difficult to turn things around.

It was the early 1970s and my husband Malc and I had gone in two short years from two people and a daft dog called Henry living on two wage packets to two adults, two children, a daft dog called Henry and a mortgage living on one wage packet. Instead of two into two it was now four plus a dog into one and so began our decline into debt. Just after our daughter was born in 1973 we started to look for a new house as the house we lived in had only two bedrooms and we wanted one with at least three bedrooms. We sold our first home and bought the one that we were to live in for the next thirty years. We had to move out of the city as we could not afford a three-bedroom house in the city but in the smaller market town of Mansfield, which was fifteen miles from Nottingham; houses were cheaper than the city. After much searching we found the house that we fell in love with at first sight we put down the biggest deposit we could and we got the biggest mortgage we could.

How Malc managed to convince the mortgage lender that we could afford the mortgage repayments I still don’t know as these were the days when lending was still done responsibly. I think that maybe it was the fact that we had put down a large deposit that came from the profit on the sale of our first home that got us the mortgage. We started off just about able to break even at this point we had one child but within the year our second child was born so our expenses went up quite a bit. What followed next was a series of mortgage interest increases that put us into the start of our troubles. When we took out our mortgage the interest rate was about 7% it was to rise over time to a staggering 14% unfortunately our income did not rise to match this.

In the next two years the children had gone from babies to toddlers who need new clothes and shoes it seemed almost continually as they seem to grow and change as toddlers do at an extremely fast rate. Our first child was a girl and our second child was a boy, some things our son could wear after his sister had grown out of them but many things he could not as they were not suitable for a boy to wear. It was during this time that things started to go really wrong. We continually had more month than we did money and with two very young children I was tied to the home and there was no way I could earn any money to help out so the burden was left wholly on my husband. Bless him he did his best, he did overtime when it was available but we began to start the month on pay-day when all our debts had been paid already out of money for the coming month. It got so bad that we had a letter from our Bank Manager saying that they wanted to go back to the old arrangement where we banked with them rather than them banking with us. The letter was amusingly written but the bank manager was deadly serious and he was telling us that starting each month off in debt and going overdrawn at the bank had to stop.

How had we got to this point? It started off when we had needs that we had to meet and no money to meet them. When the children grew out of their shoes, even though the shoes had plenty of wear left in them they still had to have new ones. Not having the money to go to the shop and buy a new pair of shoes we got a store credit card from the Co-op with this card we could purchase things in the Co-op now and pay off the debt by instalments this seemed to be the answer to our prayers.

Our Co-op was a large department store that sold everything that a family could need, from food to clothing, to electrical items, from shoes to furniture and everything in between. How easy was it to get store credit cards in our dire financial condition? It was dangerously easy, we were never refused one all we had to do was fill in a form. The good thing or so it seemed at the time was that the necessary repayments were small, but what we didn’t think about was that it also took a long time to pay the amount off. Another thing that we didn’t take into account was the fact that when you pay off the minimum allowed you barely cover the interest due which leaves the sum borrowed hardly touched at all.

Malc worked in an office type environment so he had to have decent clothes for work so again a store card came to our rescue and we got a Peter Brown store card. Peter Brown was a men’s tailors so any shirts, ties, suits or jackets that Malc needed for work we got from Peter Browns. The repayments on this card were also only small and spread out over a long period of time. We also got a credit card so that we could buy in an emergency from other shops and of course there were to be some emergency purchases.

At first it was fine and we managed to repay the small amounts on each card but of course what would happen is that before the item was paid off we needed to buy more and even small repayments start to add up. What we found happening was that we were still paying for items long after the kids had grown out of them.

As a result of this we had no disposable income at all; every penny was already spent before it came into our hands. This in turn meant that we had to depend on the store cards even more, no money meant as far as we could see no other choice. When we needed to buy new clothes or shoes, which with two young children was quite often the only way to get them was on one of the cards that we had.

One of the things about stores big enough to offer their own store credit cards is that they often stock named brand goods. If I were to buy a pair of shoes for one of the children from one of the cheaper shoe shops or off the local market I would probably have to pay around £5 a pair. However, when I bought from the Co-op they had Start-rite shoes and Clarks, which started at around £20 a pair.

There is no doubt that these were very good shoes and the children’s feet were measured properly for their shoes and then the sales person fitted them and checked the fitting. No doubt either that the quality of the shoes were well worth the price it was just that at that time I could not afford to pay that sort of money for shoes that they would grow out of in less than six months.

If I bought Jeans on the market I would pay around £3 for them but in the Co-op they only stocked Wrangler and Lee Cooper which retailed at around £12 which was a phenomenal price for children’s Jeans, they were almost the same price as the adults.

I remember one time we had gone out only to get a pair of jeans for our son. However, we ended up with wrangler Jeans and a wrangler jacket for our son and also the same for our daughter and also a pair of jeans for Malc. If I had got £3 cash in my purse that day then I could have got a pair of no name Jeans off the market. Because I didn’t have £3 cash we went to buy the Jeans on the card and instead of spending only £3 we ended up spending over £50 that we didn’t have.

We had thrown caution to the wind we were already drowning and in a weird way this aberration had given us some momentary relief. Of course it was a stupid thing to do and of course the exhilaration of spending that money didn’t last long as soon as the next Co-op bill for the shop card came in the increased payments brought us back sown to earth with an almighty bump.

We also encountered a strange phenomenon that when we started to get into real trouble and the debt started to really mount up we would often be overtaken by the mind set of ‘what the hell.’  This what the hell mindset meant that we were already out of our depth with this so what difference will that one more purchase make in the grand scheme of things?

This sort of thinking strangely threw us right over the top, sense and reason seemed to fly out of the window and a sort of resentful rebellion seemed to take hold of us. We didn’t want to be in this position we didn’t want to get further in debt but no matter how hard we tried or how many things we cut back on we still ended up getting further and further in debt. It all seemed so unfair, so many of the things that were happening to us seemed out of our control, no matter how hard Malc worked some one else had first claim on his money.

We were lost in a sea of debt we were from a working class background where people were use to only having enough money to live on. Neither of our families had a bank account which was not strange as they had nothing to put into a bank and the jobs they did they got wages for which they were paid in cash either every Friday or every other Friday. Only those who had a career had a salary and a bank account and those who had jobs just got wages. We had a bank account because we had a mortgage, which my family could not and did not understand why we had wanted to saddle ourselves with such a millstone around our necks for the next twenty-five years of our lives in the first place.

We had dug this hole all on our own and so we would have to get out of it all on our own. There is a saying that my folks used quite a lot, and that was ‘you’ve made your bed now you must lay on it’. What this amounted to is where you are is the result of your own actions and you are the one that will have to pay the consequences of those actions. Even if they wanted to help us out of our troubles our families couldn't because they didn’t have the means to do that.

Even when we managed to not purchase anything new because we were still only paying the minimum allowed on each card, which we had no choice about this because we had no money with which to do otherwise and the sum that we owed never seemed to go down by very much. In effect what was happening was that we had only paid the interest due and the debt itself had only been reduced by pennies instead of pounds.

Even after paying off the different cards for many months we still owed nearly as much as we had originally and with each new purchase that amount grew. There seemed no way out we just didn’t know what to do next. How did we get out of this fix? Well that will be the subject of another hub.

You have seen how we got ourselves into debt now read the follow up hub on how we got ourselves back out of debt click here to go to this next hub http://hubpages.com/hub/How-We-Got-Out-of-Debt

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