New Year debt hangover

Santa must have brought me bills for Christmas... I don’t know how else they got here!

Whilst you still have the afterglow of Christmas, look directly at your debt. Write it down in as much detail as you can. I like Excel spreadsheets, but any old spreadsheet or even a ledger will do.

I used to use an old accountancy book I found and boy did I learn to hate and love that book. It carried a record of all my spending, both good and bad. I learned from the ground up what I was really spending and on what. I saw gradually how I never really made choices about my debts, they just happened. But by keeping a record I could actually make choices; I was conscious of what I was doing.

Write down what you spend, owe and what you believe the interest rate to be. Without being patronising (because I didn’t know myself) that’s the number with the % next to it. Just do this for a few minutes every day; I suggest a maximum of 20 minutes.

The next major thing to do is cut off all access to any further debt. Cut up your credit cards, then contact the company and tell them you are not going to need them ever again. Do the same with your overdraft, tell your bank not to offer you a further overdraft and tell your friends never to lend you any money.

I thought I didn't have a problem with credit cards. Then I added up the credit I could get through them. I had enough credit to buy a flight to anywhere and live for about six months. I could buy a car, I could go shopping for weeks.

I knew myself well enough to know that in a moment of depression/bipolar or low self esteem, this available credit would get used up on something to distract me from getting on with my real life. So I took them out of my wallet and I started to bend them in half, wiggling them backwards and forwards until they broke in half and then in quarters.

Then I walked down the road, putting each piece of the eight credit cards into a different rubbish bin, just in case some fraudster wanted to put them back together again. Not that I was paranoid or anything!

It took me a few weeks to contact the credit card companies to tell them what I had done – and get them to confirm they would never send me a replacement. I know this doesn't sound fun, but it left me more light spirited than anything else that year. I was looking into the eye of the debt storm and had taken the first action to stop.

Maybe I won't clear it by next Christmas, maybe I won't be able to go spending like I did last Christmas. But maybe I will.

But this time, however much I have drunk, however excited I get, I wont' be able to make the situation worse. If I don’t have access to credit, I can only spend what I have in my bank account or with the cash I actually have in my wallet.

I might not be able to plan over 350 days to next Christmas, but I know one thing. For once, I won't be have a debt hangover.