I am feeling a little blue today.

It seems that life takes great pleasure in kicking you when you are down, and today has been no exception.

One Step Forward

It started off well: I should have been off work today enjoying my long weekend, but instead I had arranged to go into work for 8 hours overtime (6am to 2pm).

The day got even better when I was asked to stay until 6pm instead. 12 hours at time and a half.

Despite how facetious that may sound, my regular readers will know I am working to pay off my debt before New Years Day 2010, at the very latest. A renewed sense of urgency was provided by my employer when they sent round an email two months ago warning that we were facing a significant funding short-fall over the coming years, and salary cuts were not outside the realms of possibility. Any and all overtime is therefore extremely welcomed, and worked in earnest towards my goal.

Two Steps Forward

As I was edging closer to being one or two months away from being able to pay off my largest, final debt, I phoned my loan provider today to ask what the settlement figure would be if I paid today. I couldn’t of course, but I wanted to know precisely how far away I was, as simply calculating on the loan outstanding is only half the equation.

It’s quite a complicated affair. There is an early settlement fee of 1 months interest if settled early at all, or 2  months interest if paid before at least 50% of the loan term has passed. There is also the added complication of a scaled percentage of the loan insurance being refundable, depending on what stage the loan is at.

If I paid today, I have precisely £8,036.64 outstanding (or $12,726 USD for my readers across the pond).  That is still £2,200 more than I have, so paying today wasn’t an option. But next month could well be!

One Step Back

All sounding quite good so far isn’t it?

Except, as of next month my eligibility for a 56% loan insurance refund expires. From next month onwards until sometime late in 2010, I become eligible for only a 26% refund instead. Despite my £415 payment next month, I will actually owe more afterward than I do this month. The settlement figure for next month will be in the region of £8,400. Canceling the insurance altogether whilst tempting, is not viable due to…

Two Steps Back

I found an email from the Big Boss with an update on the 5 year forecast for our organisation. It re-iterated the problem in the last email we all received, but put it starkly that despite looking initially at non-pay budgets, there will have to be cuts.

Department heads have been asked to identify 2% savings for next year, saving as a whole £5 million for 2010/2011. If it stopped there, I would not be too concerned. A one-off saving of £5m in an organisation the size of ours would be achievable with relatively little pain and likely no compulsory redundancy whatsoever. That £5 million though is merely the tip of the iceberg.

After 2010/2011, we will need to save £7.5 million every year until at least 2015.

Compulsory redundancy across the entire organisation is a certainty. My department may be insulated from the initial round, but I do not see how we can reasonably escape the entire period unscathed. Bad, bad times are ahead and I really dislike this feeling. I have worked for the same organisation for coming close to 8 years. I enjoy my job, I am good at it. The pay enables me to plan for my future.

Without it, and in the current financial climate, I no longer have a sense of direction.

Even the best case scenario is emotionally unpleasant – 5 whole years of wondering if I will have a job month after month. The recession has thrown my 5 Year Plan (and countless others, of course) out the window. My dream of becoming a home-owner in 4 years time, faded with this evening’s sunset.

Three Steps Back

A letter from my solicitor had landed on the mat for me when I got home.

Half expecting some good news, it was instead, the third and final kick of today. My wife (who wanted the divorce in the first place) has decided to contest it and defend the matter in court.

As she is bankrupt and to my knowledge unemployed, the public purse will be paying for her defense courtesy of Legal Aid, while I continue to pay for my solicitor and subsequent court hearings out of my own pocket, if there is any money in them come the end, given Kick Two.

Closing Thoughts

I must get consumer-debt free, and soon. It is reasonably likely that employment will continue for at least another year before anything starts rumbling in my direction; yet I cannot help but worry about “What if I get made redundant tomorrow?”. All my hard work over this year would virtually have been for nothing.

All my hopes, all my dreams, all my plans, gone in a single stroke.

What will I do?

Since splitting with my wife last December, I have been constantly reminded of her presence by virtue of her being a ‘Financial Associate’ on my credit reports. This never used to be a big deal; Up to the point of the split she had an excellent credit rating. Since then however she dropped the bombshell that she has been declared bankrupt.

I have been racing around since learning this, trying to get her off my reports by filing Notices of Disassociation with the three Credit Reference Agencies here in the UK. When I apply for credit, she is checked as well. When they see ‘Undischarged Bankrupt’ on her report, they tend to (quite understandably) run a mile.

What is a Notice of Disassociation?

It’s essentially a document you send to a Credit Reference Agency (CRA) notifying them that you are no longer financially linked to another individual. Each CRA has a different method for unlinking, but all require much the same information.

Why Would I Be Linked?

People become linked when they hold a joint financial product: For example they may hold a joint bank account, have (as in our case) taken out a joint loan, have a mortgage, or jointly hold credit cards or any other line of credit in ‘both names’.

Can I Become Unlinked?

The short answer is yes. The longer answer is it depends on the circumstances!

If the joint product that linked you is ‘Settled’ (paid off), then you can request the link be broken as you no longer hold a joint credit product. In my case for example, the joint loan we had was settled a while ago (by taking out a bigger one at a higher rate – doh!). Because we held no other joint products, my request to break the link was approved by all 3 CRA’s.

You don’t have to stay financially linked just because you’re still married, or still going out with each other, or they are still your parent, or whatever. The only factor that matters is that whatever caused you to be joined, must no longer be active.

I’ve broken down the steps you need to take with each CRA below to become financially disassociated with a particular person if you need to.

Experian / Credit Expert

I’ve listed this one first, because they’re the most pleasant to deal with and the fastest to act on the request (in my experience it took them 5 days from start to finish). I was in my 30 day free trial of CreditExpert and it didn’t cost me anything to request, or to see the result. Because I did it via QuidCo, they actually paid me 50p to sign up for my free report!

1. Sign up for their free trial (direct) or QuidCo and get yourself all activated.
2. Pull your Report (don’t include your score)
3. Fill in this form (you’ll need your report reference number from (2)).
4. Wait for the confirmation email (5-14 days).
5. Re-Check your report to make sure the association is gone.
6. Ring 0800 656 9000 (Option 4) to cancel inside 30 days.

Equifax

These guys are the next easiest to deal with, but I found they did not act on my Notice until after my free trial ended and they’d taken my first subscription payment of £6.99. However, as above, if you do it via QuidCo you’ll get a cashback kickback for signing up to the free trial. In the case of Equifax, they’ll pay you a fiver. Therefore you’ll either make £5 pure profit from doing this, or at the very worst only be stung for £1.99 overall.

1. Sign up for their free trial (direct) or QuidCo and get activated.
2. Pull your Report and note the reference number on it.
3. Create a Customer Assistance Account (Click ‘Login’ then ‘Create New’)
4. ‘Ask A Question’ > About ‘Associate Names’ (and fill it all in)
5. Wait forever (they’ll email you when they’ve done it).
6. Re-Check your report to make sure the association is gone.
7. Ring 0800 7839421 to cancel your membership.

CallCredit

These require the most work from you, and also the most initial outlay. They offer no free trial, and require you to spend £12.99 upfront to get access to their service. The only saving grace is it offers you 3 months of access and includes a calculated credit score for free. You will also need access to a printer, an envelope, a stamp and a post box.

1. Sign up for the service and get activated.
2. Pull your report and note the reference number.
3. Print out this form and fill it in.
4. Post it (see below).
5. Set a reminder in your diary to cancel in 3 months.
6. Log in > Account Details > Cancel Subscription button.

The completed form should be posted to:

You will receive a letter by return postal mail advising of the result (about a 3 week turnaround).

As you can see doing this will cost you about £13.35 (including the cost of the stamp and envelope) but if you need to get someone off your report for the same reason I did, then it is money well spent. If you are a QuidCo user already, then you could get paid £5.50 to do the first two meaning the third one only really costs you £7.85 for 3 months of access to your credit report and score – which isn’t all that bad at all.

Let me know how you get on. Did you have any issues reporting a problem with your credit files?

This is part 4 of the Meltdown Monday series. You can catch up on part 3 here or start at the beginning with part 1.

I didn’t know it at the time, but organising your finances takes a lot of time and effort. I must have spent at least a week pouring over my bank statements figuring out where all my money was going. I had at least got to grips with who I owed, and how much I owed them. I didn’t know it at the time but this is the very first step to getting out of debt: Know what you owe.

I bumbled along for a few more months. In April I went on holiday to Cyprus with a friend because “I deserved it” and “I needed the break”. Looking back it wasn’t a bad look-after-me decision, but it was a bad money decision. I didn’t spend any money I didn’t already have, but it was money that would have been better put towards my debt. About a week into the holiday I promised myself that the £2,000 I’d likely spend in total was going to be my last conscious bad money decision.

When I returned home, I went spreadsheet crazy. I created a budget based on what I was spending having had my original thought to reduce my outgoings some months before. Then I went to see where I could save even more. By tweaking down the numbers and making myself think that was all the money I had, I started to spend even less. Money freed itself up for more and more debt repayment along the way and I could start to see debt freedom approaching. New Years Day was no longer an unattainable dream but a real possibility.

By the time I’d finished tweaking I had over £1,000 a month appearing as disposable income, based on my net take-home salary. If I stuck to my “do every piece that comes” overtime strategy for the year that would increase significantly. Not bad considering in November and December 2008 I was sinking fast into my overdraft and approaching the hard limit of the bottom.

I learned a few weeks later that my wife had, under the sheer pressure of her debt mountain been declared bankrupt. I suspect at that point my credit rating took a big hit as we were financially linked, courtesy of a joint loan we had taken out when we got married. That had fortunately been settled prior to us parting ways, but I needed to find out how to get the link between us severed before I applied for credit again. In all likelihood I’d get turned down for buying a chocolate bar on credit at this point, nevermind anything bigger.

I had mixed feelings about learning this. As much as I tried to be jubilant or consider it “revenge” as my friends and family encouraged, I couldn’t bring myself to feel that way. I was upset for her and what it meant for her in the long run. Going bankrupt is akin to financial suicide for a minimum of 6 years, and for life in certain respects such as buying a house. I would not wish that on my worst enemy, and certainly not someone I had in the beginning, loved very dearly.

And so we come to ‘now’. It’s approaching the middle of September 2009 and I’m on target for paying off my debt earlier than planned, if all goes well. I have paid off my Egg card entirely and have slightly over £200 remaining on my promotional 0% balance transfer. The loan I took out to replace the others is front-loaded, so I am saving like crazy to pay that off before my big day (in a high interest account of course). My divorce continues to rumble along in the background, rearing its head occasionally, courtesy of solicitor ping-pong.

And Five Pence Piece was born.

I had not intended to start a blog, and indeed didn’t until the middle of last month. I started to really get into some American Personal Finance blogs such as The Simple Dollar, No Credit Needed and Five Cent Nickel. These guys are all dedicated, hard-working folks who not only tell us their stories, their dreams and their hurts, but also try and educate us in the murky, difficult, confusing world that is personal finance. None of them claim to be experts (and none of them are), but they’ve all “been there and done that” and are willing to share their experiences along the way.

I wanted to try and so the same, but provide an insight into a UK journey of debt to prosperity, concentrating on UK products, UK issues and UK services. I want to help fellow British people get out of debt and free themselves from the consumer society we now live in. It’s almost never too late to realise that the things we own do not define who we are; who we are inside defines our outside. I want to be rich, but I know it’s a life-long road to get there and I’m not afraid of the hard work required.

As I say at the foot of every page on this site: Live according to your means, not up to your expectations.

You’re welcome to join me on my journey.

I’ll be honest when I make a mistake, to save you from making the same one. When I find a product, service or strategy that is useful, I’ll share it.  As you can probably tell from this series of posts, my first tip is contained within. Family finances should be discussed openly, honestly, and jointly. Agreement must be reached that both partners can live by.

If you’re not honest with each other then any relationship is destined to fail before it even gets going.

Did you enjoy reading this series? Did it teach you anything? I’d be pleased to engage you in the comments.