DON’T TURN YOUR BACK ON DEBT

Last year, Clare Seal and her husband came to breaking point with their mounting debt. Now, she shares how they have already paid off £10,000 and are taking back control of their finances

A personal journey to financial freedom and restored self-worth

On 14 March 2019, I sat down and typed the words ‘25k of credit card debt, 2k of overdraft, £0 accessible savings’ and posted them on Instagram under an anonymous account I called @myfrugalyear. It was the first time I’d admitted to myself, let alone anyone else, just how much debt my husband, Phil, and I had.

I’ve never had a healthy relationship with money. When I started working 10 years ago, I was earning 16k a year in a hospitality job, doing 60 hours a week, and felt I deserved to treat myself to whatever I wanted because I was working so hard. My rent was almost half my monthly salary, and I was spending the rest with reckless abandon, mostly to impress people or as a quick fix when I felt sad, bored or anxious. You see the house renovation, the capsule wardrobe – in real life and online – and it can make you feel like you need to have all of those things to feel adequate and complete.

I got into a cycle of using payday loans with astronomical interest rates, promising myself each time that this was the very last one I’d take out.

Phil and I met at university, and got together four years later. He worked in hospitality, too, and was on a similarly low salary. We stumbled through the years that followed, always saved just in the nick of time by a new job with better pay, or a bonus, or a family bailout. By then, I was working in marketing for an interiors company and earned around £30,000. After a Pinterest-perfect wedding (we put 12k of the cost on our credit card), two children and four house moves in five years, things started to spiral out of my control.

It all came to head last March, two weeks before payday, when the bank called to say I’d exceeded my £2,000 unarranged overdraft limit and when were we going to be able to pay it back? I felt ashamed and angry with myself for getting into this situation. It was a horrible feeling. Over the next few days, Phil and I mustered the courage to check

all our balances and write everything down. We made a spreadsheet with our income and all our fixed outgoings. It was suddenly easy to see where we were haemorrhaging money: all the meals out, takeaways, bits for the house. We started by cutting out things we wouldn’t miss, such as subscriptions that had run on (like my gym membership), and made a vow not to buy anything non-essential on our credit cards. If we could afford to buy something with cash that was fine, otherwise we couldn’t have it. We didn’t want to deny ourselves completely. I knew crash budgeting wouldn’t be sustainable long-term; eventually we’d fall off the wagon and feel even worse.

A year-and-a-half on from that horrible day, we’ve paid off over £10,000. It’s a long, hard slog but we’ve kept at it. Obviously the coronavirus pandemic has had an impact on us, like it has for many people, but we’re on track to pay off the rest of our debt by the end of 2021.

My relationship with money has definitely changed. It didn’t happen overnight, but diminishing the shame

I felt around having debt has completely transformed things for me. If you’re so ashamed you can’t even pick up the phone to your bank to ask what options are available, or ask family for help if they’re able to provide it, that’s causing practical harm to your financial situation, not just your mental health. Opening up anonymously on Instagram was the start. I was amazed by the reaction; within six weeks I had 10,000 followers and now have over 57k. That community has helped and stopped me feeling like the only one who’s made those mistakes.

When I was at my lowest, I saw my financial difficulties as an extension of my identity – yet another thing about myself that I didn’t like. My debt was one of the weapons I used to punish myself when I was anxious, which fuelled my toxic spending habits. Separating my financial situation from my self-worth has been freeing. For a long time, I couldn’t see a plan for the future that didn’t involve winning the lottery! Now, the clouds have cleared and I can actually see the way forward.