Yes, many a lady will be on tenterhooks today, working out in her head how to propose to her fella, where to do it and what her strategy will be if rejected!   But maybe, before you take the plunge and go for the jugular, you should pop another question before the big one and actually come straight out and ask whether your man is in personal debt.

I’ve come to this conclusion having been told about a lady who lives over towards Hull, who is living in complete ignorance about her husband’s life as a debtor. She herself has a great reputation at work, is an ex-policewoman and swears blind that her husband’s business is booming.  The reality is that he has £21,000 owing in outstanding CCJs and has an ethic of “always paying for everything in cash”, because he isn’t allowed to have a credit card.  He is also not paying anyone at all when it comes to his business, leaving a trail of debts behind him as he moves from one supplier to another.

This reckless approach to debt is not typical of most of the people who have personal debts. In many cases, personal debt has been acquired due to circumstances outside of a person’s control, whether that is divorce, ill health, unemployment, redundancy, or student debt.  Most people are mortified by the very thought that they can’t pay someone back in full and never took on credit in the belief that they would not be able to pay it back.

But which sort is your intended?  Is he a secret harbourer of personal debts and CCJs or is he a straight down the line kind of guy with some debts that he is managing at present?  Is he in need of help in sorting out his debt situation, or sticking his head in the sand and refusing to accept the figures that are constantly whizzing around his head?  What’s his track record with his finances and how open would he be with you if things went wrong in the future and a manageable personal debt situation suddenly got out of hand?

Once upon a time, in a land far far away, the fairytale romance and poignant proposal would never have had to consider these factors, but this is 2012 and millions of Brits are drowning in personal debt.  Every one of our debt advisers can point to relationships in which one partner never came clean about their debt history, or has hidden a personal debt situation from their partner.  Debt counselling is often a form of marriage guidance these days, as couples struggle to come to terms with a big rift in their relationship caused by money worries. 

Are you brave enough to propose on February 29th?  If so, well done, but if you’ve been brave enough to ask the big Q, you really do deserve credit.  Whatever response you get, at least you might be able to work on your finances together, free from secrets, and with the help of a debt adviser if the answer to the big Q proves that quick and on-the-ball debt advice is required.

Burying one’s head in the sand and not getting debt advice is just crazy. A call to a debt adviser costs nothing and can signpost the way forward when it comes to your own personal debt situation. You don’t have to take the advice, if you don’t want to, so what do you have to lose?

So if we’re not planning to take action on our personal debts, what are we doing? Apparently, according to the Money Advice Trust, letting unemployment increase our debt woes. This is now a major cause of personal debts and they say many of their callers have now taken out not just one payday loan, but several, in order to compensate for their lack of income.

Others who are doing nothing about their personal debts are pensioners – according to the Prudential, 18% of pensioners are now retiring with debts. There’s a sub-set of debtors who are letting Council Tax debts ruin their lives, another getting into debt thanks to unpaid energy bills and a new generation of smart-phone debtors.

According to an article in The Independent (February 11, 2012), 24.8% of us have personal debts thanks to unemployment, 23.3% because of reduced income and 9.9% because they overcommitted on credit. Marriage breakdown accounts for debt in 8.9% of cases and injury and illness has caused 8.6% of personal debt cases. Are you included in these statistics, or are you in debt thanks to increased expenses, a failed business, pregnancy or childbirth, bereavement, retirement or because you are living on reduced benefits or having to care for relatives or friends?

The common denominator for all these people in personal debt, regardless of the reason why, is that they all need to get help and access debt advice. The sooner every single one picks up the phone and gets help, the greater the chance that they will find a solution that avoids the final resort of bankruptcy. Being one of the 97% not planning to get any help within six months is sheer lunacy. In six months time, it could all be far too late and rather than a rehabilitation and rescue, you could be financially dead in the water.

I hope my words of warning shake up some of the ostriches out there who are afraid that the dragon in this Chinese New Year will be the debt adviser on the end of the phone. Contrary to myth, debt advisers are not judgmental dragons, but people who really care, see hundreds or thousands of cases like yours each year and know how to help you through the debt tunnel, towards the light that can lay at the other end of it, if you do the right things en route.

If you are one of the many people who has been made redundant and whose redundancy payments are drawing to a close and you have no hope of another job on the horizon, you really do need to sort out your personal debt situation with the help of a debt counsellor. In the words of Nike, ‘just do it’. If you don’t, six months down the line, you could be rueing having found that pile of sand and shoved your head into it!

Burying one’s head in the sand and not getting debt advice is just crazy. A call to a debt adviser costs nothing and can signpost the way forward when it comes to your own personal debt situation. You don’t have to take the advice, if you don’t want to, so what do you have to lose?

So if we’re not planning to take action on our personal debts, what are we doing? Apparently, according to the Money Advice Trust, letting unemployment increase our debt woes. This is now a major cause of personal debts and they say many of their callers have now taken out not just one payday loan, but several, in order to compensate for their lack of income.

Others who are doing nothing about their personal debts are pensioners – according to the Prudential, 18% of pensioners are now retiring with debts. There’s a sub-set of debtors who are letting Council Tax debts ruin their lives, another getting into debt thanks to unpaid energy bills and a new generation of smart-phone debtors.

According to an article in The Independent (February 11, 2012), 24.8% of us have personal debts thanks to unemployment, 23.3% because of reduced income and 9.9% because they overcommitted on credit. Marriage breakdown accounts for debt in 8.9% of cases and injury and illness has caused 8.6% of personal debt cases. Are you included in these statistics, or are you in debt thanks to increased expenses, a failed business, pregnancy or childbirth, bereavement, retirement or because you are living on reduced benefits or having to care for relatives or friends?

The common denominator for all these people in personal debt, regardless of the reason why, is that they all need to get help and access debt advice. The sooner every single one picks up the phone and gets help, the greater the chance that they will find a solution that avoids the final resort of bankruptcy. Being one of the 97% not planning to get any help within six months is sheer lunacy. In six months time, it could all be far too late and rather than a rehabilitation and rescue, you could be financially dead in the water.

I hope my words of warning shake up some of the ostriches out there who are afraid that the dragon in this Chinese New Year will be the debt adviser on the end of the phone. Contrary to myth, debt advisers are not judgmental dragons, but people who really care, see hundreds or thousands of cases like yours each year and know how to help you through the debt tunnel, towards the light that can lay at the other end of it, if you do the right things en route.

If you are one of the many people who has been made redundant and whose redundancy payments are drawing to a close and you have no hope of another job on the horizon, you really do need to sort out your personal debt situation with the help of a debt counsellor. In the words of Nike, ‘just do it’. If you don’t, six months down the line, you could be rueing having found that pile of sand and shoved your head into it!

On the other hand, is this making you think about one of your loved ones and their recent behaviour?  Could there actually be a secret debtor in the room and should you do a quick Colombo and get to the bottom of a mystery that seems to be bugging you?

Personally, I think it’s a good thing if a family member does expose a personal debt problem suffered by a loved one.  I see this as a watershed, as once the tissue of lies is blown apart, the harsh truth becomes easier to swallow.  It’s a kind of now or never moment: a chance to actually start to get things sorted out and tackle what might seem like an insurmountable personal debt mountain.

So instead of sitting back and ‘suspecting’ that a husband, wife, son, daughter, brother or sister, or anyone else for that matter, might have a big debt problem, help them sort it out by getting to the truth.  Start to look out for certain signs.  Are they always keen to get to the post first?  Do they answer the phone quicker than anyone else?  Do they always seem to be ill, or ‘too busy’ to go out to dinner with the rest of the gang? Do they seem edgy, depressed or ‘absent’ at times? Do they seem unable to sleep at night?

These are just some of the telltale signs that someone might be in debt, but then you could look out for changes in habit.  If someone who’s always loved their foreign holidays suddenly extols the virtues of holidaying at home, they might need to cut back.  If they start to take on lots of overtime or extra shifts, they might have a need to bring in more money.  If they always change the subject when talk of money arises, why is that?

There’s a real kindness in exposing the truth, to my way of thinking, as long as it’s done in a positive way and with a sense of ‘now let’s sit down and do something about this together’.  Do it to be cruel and you could find out that your actions come back to haunt you, as many a person with personal debts has fallen foul of fate, whether that’s because they lost their job, lost out to the lawyers in a divorce battle or suffered ill health.  That could be any of us, at any time, so never ever crow about debt, or it could turn around and bite you.

On the other hand, the supportive ‘detective’ can perform a really useful role, in convincing the debtor that they need to speak to a debt specialist, get professional support and take on board the advice offered through debt consultancy.  Once the personal debt issue is out in the open, it is so much easier to stop pretending things will get better by themselves and actually do something to make them get better.  All you need to do is encourage that thought process.

You don’t need a crumpled raincoat and cigar to be a debt-busting Columbo.  Just use your eyes and ears, observe your loved ones actions and pay more attention to them.  But, if you’re no Peter Falk, you could always try my Mum’s old tack when it came to bullying.  She’d regularly sit me down and say ‘ You would tell me if you were being bullied, wouldn’t you, because we could do something about it together’.  The same goes for personal debt.  Start a theoretical conversation that relates to hoping that your loved one would share a debt problem with you and you might just provide the catalyst for them to do just that.

This story related to a descent into personal debt, which started when the man took out a loan, which then led to more borrowing and a personal debt problem that spiralled out of control. Various loans were taken out over a period of time, with thousands of pounds now owed.  Things got worse when the man married and then had two children, to the point that he was paying out more in personal debt repayments than he was bringing in through income.

The man has bravely told the paper how he was left with no option but to declare himself bankrupt, after bailiffs had arrived at the door and he had been unable to put food on the table for his family.  He spent what he calls ‘a horrendous year’ without any resource such as a credit card to help out the cash flow, but has finally turned his life around.  He talks of his pride at not having continued to bury his head in the sand and having finally done something about his personal debt.

This story should be truly inspirational to anyone reading it, who is going through the same sort of traumas thanks to personal debts.  By becoming realistic about your situation fast enough, it’s possible to avoid bankruptcy  – which really is a last resort – and maintain a reasonable standard of living whilst still paying back agreed sums to creditors.

People in England with the level of personal debt that the man in Scotland has built up can look at the option of an IVA (Individual Voluntary Arrangement), which is a legally-binding agreement to pay back creditors a sum that they agree is fair, according to household circumstances.  This is much lower than the minimum repayment that is required under normal circumstances, which brings an instant relief to family or personal finances.  Interest  and charges are frozen, so everything suddenly becomes more manageable. Best of all, it removes the contact from creditors, who may be knocking on the door, calling at all hours and sending worrying letters.

Many people with huge personal debt start looking at an IVA as a debt solution when something happens within their life that forces the issue. In the Scottish example, it was the birth of the two children and the guilt of feeling an inadequate father.  It shouldn’t actually require something like this to happen before you realise that you need swift and high impact help with your personal debt issue.  The important thing is to tell yourself that life can get better than it currently is, but only if you do something about it.  It requires you to think that enough is enough and that it’s time to act.  It just needs you to then pick up the phone and discuss the situation with a debt adviser, who can offer timely debt consultancy that you can mull over before you decide what you want to do, with no pressure or commitment to do anything. 

Knowing that you are not alone is important, because it means you aren’t going to have to suffer that most embarrassing of all human situations – being judged by others.  It just won’t happen.  As the Scottish article points out, debt isn’t something that affects just the select few and it’s something that can happen to anyone.  The person next to you on the bus, or your colleague on the next desk might be in exactly the same boat.  The only thing to worry about is that they may actually be doing something about it, while you are sitting back and doing nothing.

I checked this out myself this morning, as I’d thought about offering some advice, but wasn’t entirely sure of my facts.  What I was sure about was that checking that all the details held on you are actually correct and that other people’s personal debts aren’t on your file. Being on the electoral register at your address is also important and you need to keep yourself in check when it comes to applying for credit – do it too frequently and you’ll be viewed in a dim light.

There are also some good tips to pick up on, if you’re in a position to do it. If you can, borrow and pay back what you borrow, clearing the balance each month.  If you can do this over a series of months, this will look good on your credit record and improve your rating.  Close down any accounts that you don’t use and be canny about doing the things that lenders like, such as living in one place for a long time, having a land line rather than just a mobile and stay with the same bank over a decent period of time.

Paying the minimum payments on your personal debts on time is really important and if you miss a payment, make sure you catch up. I’m always telling my mates that, but they all seem to have this, ‘whatever’ attitude to missed and late payments. It really does matter, even if they take it all so lightly!  Similarly, don’t bust your overdraft limit.

If you are refused credit, the lender must say why, so that you can review your information and correct things with which you disagree. If you have paid off a debt on a County Court judgement, make sure this has been noted on your file.

It will cost you just £2 to get hold of a copy of your credit rating, but add another tenner to that and you can get a full list of your credit agreements and the data held on them.  It might make uncomfortable reading, but to move forward, you have to review the past, take note of the mistakes and start to put things right.

What our your tips to improve your credit rating? Let us know in the comments.

One of the top ten answers to this question at present is probably petrol – the spiralling cost of it, the bigger percentage it now takes up of your weekly or monthly wage and the amount you are now paying for on your credit card, rather than in cash. Ringing true? Well you’re not alone.

The country’s petrol bill has gone up by over 40% in the last five years, even though the amount of fuel going into the tank has fallen by 5.3%, according to recent figures from the Office For National Statistics. Cutbacks have been made in areas such as day trips, but many of us simply have to have fuel to get to work, get the children to school and get in our weekly food shop.  That’s why big personal debts are now being built up on credit cards thanks to petrol.

In a recent Moneyextra Facebook poll, we found that 25% of people with personal debts say that their debt derives from rising fuel costs.  Only the rising cost of food and unemployment ranked higher.  Driving less was seen as a major way to reduce spending. But worryingly, a quarter of those that Moneyextra asked said that they were paying for petrol on their credit card.  If that’s the case, a monthly spend on petrol will soon rack up the total personal debt on a card, causing a major problem in the long term.

If your purchases of petrol on your credit card have got way out of hand and the money that you thought you could bring in to deal with them just hasn’t materialised, you need to keep action fast, rather than just carrying on using the plastic.  You will soon reach your credit limit and, if you do, what are you then going to do to keep yourself on the road?

If petrol on plastic is your current purchase method for fuel, it should tell you that you’ve an imbalance between your income and your expenditure and you just can’t manage your financial commitments.  You need to talk to a debt counsellor, who can go through your expenditure with you and suggest how you might make savings, or be able to reduce the amounts that you need to pay back to your creditors, if you have personal debts on credit cards and loans. 
Going through this process, even if you do not then need to look at a Debt Management Plan (DMP) or an Individual Voluntary Arrangement (IVA), can help you make savings in certain areas, which can help you put more towards petrol.

Don’t allow the cost of petrol to bring you down financially.  Take action, take stock of the hole in your income that fuel is creating and talk about the ‘tank’ and the impact it’s having on your finances.  If not, you could be driving towards disaster.

Whilst this is all about orange juice that makes your eyes pop with its freshness and a really good smack from a few rashers of bacon, I like the whole ethos of this theme and think it’s got a role within the world of personal debt.

Getting to grips with personal debt is all about facing up to reality and that’s what many people fail to do until it’s too late. If you take action in time, you can save yourself facing the humiliation and stigma that’s attached to Bankruptcy and, let’s face it, however much we tell ourselves that life has changed and people won’t whisper about us behind our backs, we’re pretty much fooling ourselves on that one. We live in a society that loves a good gossip and bankruptcy is one big topic to prattle about when the victim of our conversation is out of sight.

Shaking up your wake up means doing something about your personal debts once you’ve realised that you’re in too deep. Admitting to yourself that you can’t cope with it is just step one. Shaking up things by taking positive action to get rid of it is the next important step.

The minute you’ve shaken yourself into action, and have contacted those who you owe to have the conversation that say that you can’t cope, you will be given a 30-day breather. This gives you time to get in contact with a debt adviser and form some sort of plan of what you are going to do to repay what you can afford. This could be a Debt Management Plan, or maybe an Individual Voluntary Arrangement (IVA), depending on how much you owe, what assets you have and how fast you want to get out of your debt nightmare. Hopefully, your only resort won’t be Bankruptcy, if you woke up to your personal debt situation fast enough.

If you’re a sunny-side-up kind of eggs-in-the-morning person, you might need some good positive reasons to shake up your wake up. That could be the future promise of a life free of debt, or one free from the stress of calls from your creditors. It might be the relief of not having to lie to your loved ones any more, or hide bills the moment they arrive on the mat. It might mean calm and peaceful nights full of restful sleep, rather than spending the night staring at the ceiling worrying about your bills and how you are going to meet the cost of your debt repayments.

Whatever would make you get up and be happy in the morning is what you should focus on if you want to shake up your debt wake up. Farmhouse Breakfast Week falls at a perfect time of year to do that, when your personal debts are probably at their highest after Christmas spending and your income at its most stretched.

Get cracking on your debt egg today and find some soldiers who will be your debt advisers fighting your case. Life can sizzle again, if you take positive action and get off following the signpost that says ‘Debt Freedom This Way’!

By this point, if you’re like me, you’ve already had all the credit card bills that you knocked up leading up to Christmas and in the sales, you’ve run out of cash in your bank account with all of your December pay packet being spent ages ago and all that Christmas glow has evaporated in the harsh reality of January. No wonder they call it Blue Monday!

But for some, Blue Monday is every Monday – all 52 of them in a year.  It’s also every other day of the week, because debt has engulfed all life and taken away every single joy that comes from living it. It’s one long nightmare of sleepless nights, hours spent awake worrying about how to pay bills and get creditors off the phone, guilt at the fact that personal debts built up in the first place and a helpless feeling of being out of control.

Accompanying this is an embarrassment and an inability to talk to anyone about worries and a sinking gloomy mood that constantly places a voice in the head that says “things will never get any better”.

If this sounds too familiar and your life is one long string of Blue Mondays, you need to do something about it. I was browsing the web and found that the Royal College of Psychiatrists advises people not to ignore their personal debts, as they will only get worse.  They say that one in two adults with debts has a mental health problem – this most likely being depression, I guess.  Their leaflet Debt and Mental Health advises people suffering thanks to personal debt to speak to a debt adviser and get expert advice, deciding whether you just need to unburden yourself, by speaking to a debt adviser who is non-judgmental and who can offer you solutions, or whether you also need one who will take over the responsibility of dealing with your creditors, removing all that stress and strain from your shoulders.

They advise that, if you have suffered a mental health problem, you try to explain this to your creditors, ideally through a debt adviser who can explain the impact that this might have had on your personal debt situation.  If this doesn’t happen, the spending sprees and mania that often accompanies depression and poor mental health can be viewed as simply fraudulent behaviour.

Interestingly enough, they also say that you need to consider whether you can afford to wait to see a debt adviser, given your state of mental health, or whether you need to remove yourself of the stress of waiting for an appointment, queuing at an advice centre and then waiting for action to be taken on your behalf. Many people do decide that hanging around and delaying decisive debt repayment action even longer just isn’t worth the additional strain.

All of the commentators on the link between debt and depression urge swift action, explaining that as soon as you unburden yourself of the guilt, the secrets that accompany personal debt, the truth about your financial situation and the implications for your family, the sooner you will start to feel better. 

Getting debt management advice can immediately remove the debt yoke from the neck, even if the process of unburdening results in a few tears.  Debt advisers who deal with personal debts every day of the week are used to this, so you are not alone in your emotions. 

The important thing to recognise is that depression can wreck a life more than personal debt and there is a way forward with the latter.  Find that and you will have the key that will unlock a happy life once more.  Pick up the phone and get some debt advice today and you might just start to see some of that light at the end of the debt tunnel.

The team they will be playing for is that comprising folk in personal debt, in deep distress over the results of the last few months and truly upset about decisions made by ‘referees’ working for their creditors – officials who by now have probably given them more than a few financial yellow cards, in terms of charges for late and missed payments, going over their credit limit and maybe bouncing cheques and who are now threatening red cards that will see them facing much sterner penalties.

Our debt advisers are the coaches of these personal debt players, who are trying to out-manoeuvre the opposition, but just coming up against a stalwart defence comprising the financial rules governing their credit cards, personal loans and other debts.

Debt Free Direct’s debt counsellors are also the physios, as they help restore the mental balance of people turning to them for help once they have realised the extent of their financial injuries.  Debt advisers can take away the stress, help promote better sleep and restore peace of mind to those who’ve had agents incessantly banging on the door wanting answers, payments and goods.

Above all, the debt advice team are managers, taking control of situations, seeing what the opposition expect of their debtors and coming up with a strategy to keep both sides happy.  They take on board the ability of their players, in terms of what they can afford to pay to their creditors, and then take control of the game by presenting a financial proposition to those creditors.  If both sides agree, which they often do, the final whistle is called on all the debt stress that has been bringing debtors down for months and possibly years.  A bright new chance to start climbing up the financial table again is suddenly presented and a much lower level of transfer money is paid over to the creditors.

As I said, the debt advice team know that the phones will soon be red hot with requests for debt help and debt solutions.  The January window is pretty much open and the Christmas euphoria has mostly slipped away.  While debt charities may struggle to cope with the demands of the debt fixtures at this time of the year, with diaries full and advisers in short supply, the Debt Free Direct team will be able to tackle issues instantly and start achieving some goals for those in distressing debt situations.  Pass the ball on today and tomorrow could become a whole new ball game for you and your family.

If you fancy playing your way out of debt and getting on the offensive, rather than the defensive, when it comes to facing up to your personal debts and your ‘opposition’, get in touch with a Debt Free Direct debt adviser and at least have a team talk that will give you some options to mull over. Whether you then proceed as advised is entirely down to you.  After all, you’re the one on the pitch and only you can decide whether you want to get things clear with help, go it alone, or carry on scoring financial own goals.