A DEBTOR’S DIARY
A Year in the Life of an Insolvent Baby Boomer
by
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There is a shoal of piranha fish living in my account. They are called Direct Debits and when my salary cheque is dropped in every month they go into a feeding frenzy, biting huge chunks out of it and stripping it bare in seconds so there’s nothing left to live on., So this year, as every year for as far back as I can remember, my New Year resolution has to be to get on top of the situation, work out a budget and stick to it, spending as little money as possible whilst trying not to use credit cards at all., I posted my repayment to marbles on the way to work this morning and there was another bill, my Bank of Scotland credit card bill, waiting for me on the mat tonight, as well as a bank statement., As I’ve already mentioned, my resolution for last year had been broken and I was using credit cards again, but now I have stopped, I have to work out how much is going out of my account every month and manage to live on what is left., So, after tea, when Nick had gone out for a pint or two with his mates, I got out a notebook and pen and sat down at the kitchen table with my bank statement to make a start., At the top of the statement is a summary:, Balance brought forward from previous statement £697.70, (Sounds good but statements run from 28th of one month to 28th of the next month and I get paid on 27th of each month), Total money paid in over last month - £1,171.84, (Good – be nice if that was my monthly salary but sadly £230 of it is the Christmas bonus, plus some overtime I did when we were really busy before Christmas), Total money out - £925.45, (Bad – because I didn’t draw anything out to buy food or anything since September, when outgoings way exceeded incomings and I narrowly escaped not getting my mortgage paid due to insufficient funds, so I’ve been housekeeping etc. on plastic since then including funding Christmas)., Oh, I don’t like the look of this at all. I think February will give me a clearer picture of what I’m up against. Where did I put the leftover Christmas sherry?, Wednesday 5th January, Right, let’s have another go. Think positive. The sooner you know what you’re up against, the sooner you can start figuring out how to deal with it, and I’ll be no worse off for knowing., So here I am at the kitchen table again with the bank statement and a calculator. I should be taking down the Christmas trimmings really, but I’ll do that at the weekend. Right, my monthly outgoings are:-, Mortgage £209.05, Bank Loan £257.76, Council Tax £63.00, Gas and Electricity £30.69, Water Rates £18.94, Telephone £25.85, Busfares £33.00, Cable TV £12.50, TV Rental £19.99, TV Licence £9.99, Accidental Death Cover £1.99, Income Protection Insurance £25.15, Hospital Plan £7.13, Buildings and Contents Insurance £17.67, £732.71, 'Right, then there’s the present credit card bills – the bank loan represents credit card bills past that have been converted into a loan to save on interest and the said loan has been extended over the years to take on board more credit card bills., So far this month I’ve paid £30 in credit card bills making a running total of: £732.71, + £30.00, £762.71, Now I’ve got a Bank of Scotland one to pay of: £48.02, Bringing monthly outgoings so far to: £810.73, And there’s still Goldfish, Barclaycard, Mint and abbey credit card bills to come, then I’ve got to live – food etc., It’s not having enough to live on that forced me to start using credit cards in the first place. Of course, then my salary was far less than it is now. My current earnings would be perfectly adequate if it wasn’t for the accumulation of all that debt., When I applied for, and was granted, my first credit card it was only going to be a temporary arrangement to get me through a bad patch – just until I’d found my feet., When Dave left us, the boys were at school and I worked part-time during school hours, my earnings supplemented by maintenance payments from Dave until he got made redundant two years later. So for the next few years until Jonathan became sixteen and left school I was entitled to Family Credit to supplement my part-time earnings with accompanying housing and council tax benefits so, although there was never anything to spare for luxuries, I had my carefully worked out budget and stuck to it, and though meals had to be carefully planned down to the very last scrape of margarine on the very last slice of bread, we managed – just., After Jonathan left school, my entitlement to Family Credit ended and I had to find a full-time job. I’d been working 24 hours a week anyway so moving up to full-time hours did not mean a substantial increase in my salary, but without the housing and council tax benefit I was substantially worse off as I now had to pay my rent and council tax in full., I worked out my new budget and discovered that instead of the £25 per week housekeeping I had been used to having there was only £85 left for the whole month and I needed to put away savings for Christmas, birthdays, clothes, etc. out of that. Plus my teeth started playing up and needed attention and I also discovered, on trying to read the dictionary one day, that I needed new glasses for work. (942 words),
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About the Book
Callie Clarke is in debt. Not through any fault of her own; no one could accuse her of being a “spendaholic” or a “shopaholic”—she simply squanders all her income on the mortgage repayments and household bills and has to do her food shopping on credit cards if she wants to eat each month. Once she was a young mom with a husband and two small sons. Then her husband left, and she had to bring up her boys on her own. Now they are grown up, and Callie is middle-aged, but the small borrowings have escalated over the years and accumulated like rolling a snowball to make a snowman, but this particular “snowball” has rolled its way steadily through two decades and is now of a humungous size, big enough to crush her if she’s not careful. Juggling debts has taken over Callie’s life (almost). Clearly, something needs to be done, but what? Join Callie as she battles her way through a maelstrom of debt, desperately trying to find solutions to her problems, while at the same time holding down her secretarial job and engaging in all aspects of family life in Tony Blair’s Britain in the first decade of the twenty-first century, occasionally seeking solace in the past as she looks nostalgically back to what now appears to be simpler times when all she wanted was to be Hayley Mills. It is a story about struggle and hardship but also of the strong bond of love and affection that family members have for one another, the importance of family life over everything else, and ultimately, the triumph of that love, coupled with faith and hope, over adversity.
About the Author
This book is about a person sinking deeper and deeper into debt through no fault of her own, not because she is a “spendaholic” but because she simply does not have enough money to live on. It is told with warmth and humour whilst at the same time paying due regard to the misery and despair this situation causes., It is a story woven very loosely around facts taken from my own diary at about that time but is nevertheless very definitely a work of fiction, whilst being factually accurate. It not only covers the issue of debt but is a snapshot of most aspects of family life in Tony Blair's Britain in the middle of the first decade of the 21st century. It also contains a well-deserved kick in the pants of Government, Banks and Authority in general, and although the issue of debt is not resolved by the end of the book, it is being coped with, so the novel is ultimately uplifting., It is an ideal book for the current economic climate because it is about a situation many thousands of people find themselves in. Finally, having read it I am sure will agree it is a story that desperately needs to be told., I have met representatives of D.C. Thomson & Co. Ltd. to discuss ideas I submitted for comic strip stories., I have had a story serialised in My Weekly under the pseudonym Juliet Moore, which told the story of the breakup of my marriage. The editor said he liked the fact that this was a tragic story told with warmth and humour. I hate reading anything depressing. I am a great believer in the triumph of love, faith and hope over adversity and I think this is reflected in my writing.