I used to be in nearly £30,000 value of debt and maxed out my £2,000 overdraft each month. But these small, achievable steps reworked my weekly spending. Now I’m debt free

Anyone meeting me today may assume my finances have always been in pretty tip-top shape.

They’d see a high-flying 36-year-old working as a money coach who helps families grow their financial confidence. I even guide social media users through their money problems via my Instagram account, which boasts more than 110,000 followers.

But just seven years ago – with two young children in tow – I was £27,000 in debt.

I was a walking financial disaster. For years I swiped my credit card, accumulating a mountain of debt to provide for my family. I knew things had gotten out of hand but I tried to ignore the scale of the problem.

I’d been building balances on around six or seven different credit cards and made little headway in paying them off.

But one day in 2019, when I was 29, I had to face the one terrifying fact I had been burying in the back of my mind for years: there was no money left.

I was £27,000 in debt and couldn’t take any more on.

Just how on earth did I get to that point?

The tens of thousands of pounds I accrued started quite innocently when I took out a student overdraft. I studied Modern Languages at the University of Bath and while I was there I had excavated my overdraft to the hilt.

In the eyes of a cash-strapped student, it was just more free money.

I splashed most my funds in the desperate pursuit of losing weight, by buying clothes that were too small for me, for example, in an attempt to punish myself into shedding the pounds.

My self-esteem was on the floor. I wanted to look like a certain kind of girl… and I simply didn’t. I racked up about £2,000 on my overdraft.

Luckily, not long after leaving university I learnt I was pregnant, which completely reset my relationship with my body.

But on the other hand, aged just 24, I had to prepare to be a mother with a low salary and bulging student overdraft.

At very short notice my now husband, only 23 years old at the time, and I had to throw together what we imagined a normal family life would look like.

We really wanted to give our son the best chance of having a more stable upbringing than both of us had.

It meant we couldn’t bootstrap like most graduates by renting a tiny studio apartment. I couldn’t recover from the debt I accrued or even try to climb the career ladder to grow our income. We didn’t even have savings to fall back on.

We were both supervisors at restaurants so we weren’t raking in high salaries. After maternity leave, my boss moved me into a marketing role – which gave me a leg up – and later to a brand manager, but I was only working part time.

Childcare costs were the outgoings that really wreaked havoc on our budget. Hourly rates were far lower than they are today – but there were no 30 hours of free childcare.

Our expenses were high, so I was spending enough to be in the red each month.

Our debt snowballed further still because we tried to keep up with our friends. We were renting a two-bedroom flat in Bath – another huge monthly outgoing – but our peers owned their houses. I would shell out on expensive rugs or cushions to try to make our flat feel like a home.

These well-meaning actions were quietly building balances on six or seven credit cards.

The thousands of pounds of debt accrued was in my name, too, instead of shared between myself and my husband. I was the one managing the debt and I was the one with more of a spending problem.

Perversely, I’ve always been the more financially savvy one between us. Lots of women who end up with debt are inherent problem solvers – you may not have enough money, but you know where to look to get more.

But my husband knew about the debt and that we were on the ropes.

I didn’t dare to add up the total amount of debt for years, but I knew I was in trouble. I was making the minimum payments each month, but these made no headway in bringing down the balance. I survived day to day by burying my head in the sand and carry on with normal life.

Occasionally, a crisis – an unpaid bill, for example – would rear its ugly head and I would be forced to remember the ballooning debt.

My adrenaline would spike and I’d have a moment of clarity where I knew I needed to sort it out.

But the fear that I wouldn’t be able to always stopped me.

And I’m not the only one with that feeling. More than 19 million Britons believe they will never be able to improve their financial situation, savings provider Moneybox says.

The shame was eating away at me. At the back of my mind, I kept asking myself, ‘What are you doing? You’re too clever for this.’

Money was the first thing I thought about when I woke up in the morning and the last thing I thought about before I closed my eyes at night.

My family were worried, too. I’ve no doubt that a lot of my friends were judging me – one friend in particular was very judgemental about it. One told me I should move back to where I grew up in the Midlands to save money, which wasn’t an option for me.

It was especially the smaller purchases – and the interest they accrued – that had been steadily snowballing and dragging me further into the red.

But then the final nail in the coffin came when Phil and I decided to get married when I was 28.

Our wedding weekend cost £18,000. It’s not a huge amount in comparison to today’s standards for nuptials but it was more than we could afford.

We were forced to top up payments to vendors with borrowed funds. If we postponed or cancelled the day because we couldn’t afford it then we would lose all of the money we had spent on non-refundable deposits.

I came back from our three-day honeymoon in Italy pregnant. It meant we had less than a year to clear as much debt from the wedding as possible while preparing for our second child.

Learning from my mistakes

Looking back, there were some obvious mistakes I’d made that caused me to spiral.

People pleasing takes most of the blame, next to budgeting based on ‘vibes’ rather than concrete figures. I was too vague with my budget and never got to grips with the finer details or pinned down really accurate figures.

And these mistakes came to a head in March, 2019, after my second maternity leave.

Until then, I had no capacity to deal with the ballooning sums – my husband was working 60-hour weeks in hospitality and I was trying to raise two young boys.

I had been juggling small amounts from one credit card balance to another, desperately trying to plug holes in our budget.

It was actually my first debt – the student overdraft – that pushed us over the edge.

After I was a few years out of university, it was changed to a regular overdraft. I went over the allowed limit, which meant I would be charged a daily fee. I knew it was just a matter of time before my bank called me.

The bank adviser asked me when I would be able to sort it out, and I replied that it would be at the end of the month, in two weeks’ time.

She asked why. Nobody had ever asked me that before. In a vulnerable moment, I replied, ‘There’s just no money left.’

I heard the words fall out of my mouth, and it was a huge wake up call.

Surprisingly, the lady was lovely to me. Everyone assumes a bank adviser will shout in those situations.

She refunded some previous charges on the account, which brought me under the limit, and pointed me in the direction of debt charities.

I hung up and hit a low point. How had my life come to this? But that lady had given me hope that maybe I could turn things around.

How I turned it around

I roughly knew the balance of each card but the thought of adding it together had always made me panic. I totted up the amounts and realised it was almost my annual salary – as much as £27,500.

I called all of my lenders and asked if there were any gestures of goodwill they could offer. Some gave me three months with no interest, for example, which meant I’d be able to continue making the same payments but it would make a larger headway in my debt.

Then I turned to our bill providers as energy prices were still competitive. We changed contracts and also switched to sim-only mobile phone deals to throw more money at the debt.

My husband was about to start a job that paid a slightly better salary, enough to pay an extra £100 a month to help clear the balances. And in September my eldest child started school, which saved us money on childcare costs.

We recalculated our monthly budget and used every opportunity to tackle the debt.

That one day completely shifted my mindset – but it required maintenance not to fall back into old ways.

We had been making good progress but a few months later, in the summer, one of our cars needed all new tyres. Once again, we delved into my credit card balance to pay for them.

After that, we worked even harder to pay down the debt.

I made the final payment in March 2021. It was a moment of elation – but also danger. One of the most concerning emotions you can have surrounding money is relief. It can allow you to lose control.

I had to be really careful not to not slip back into old habits, and I admit I did have another period of bad spending.

But creating a new goal – becoming homeowners – was crucial to keeping us on track. We finally purchased our three-bedroom home in Bath in 2022. This was the moment I thought, ‘We’ve done it!’.

My tips as a money coach

Along the way, money and debt became a big part of my work – and I decided to switch to working in the personal finance sector full time.

It started on that horrible day of realisation in 2019. I created a then-anonymous Instagram account and posted my credit card totals.

I had a small following for a couple of months, and devotees would give me tips on how to reduce my debt. But I later wrote an essay for a popular blog and my followers surged from 400 to 14,000 in two days. It struck a chord with a lot of people.

I was given a deal in the September of that year to write my first book – Real Life Money: An Honest Guide to Taking Control of Your Finances. It gave me enough cash to start freelancing in marketing.

And then in 2022 I qualified as a money coach after completing a three month certification. Now I spend my days running coaching sessions for corporate clients, writing for newspapers and consulting for personal finance brands.

If you’re in debt, I’d say to start with the small things. Sort out your wardrobe, for example, and sell old clothes on a platform like Vinted or switch on transaction roundups on an app like Moneybox. Those little ‘snowflake’ payments snowball and can have a bigger impact than you realise.

Speak to all of your lenders and look at all of your other contracts. Switching to a cheaper contract can really add up.

You’ve got two options – continue with the way things currently are and keep your head in the sand. In two years’ time you may find yourself in an even worse position. Or you can get your finances to spiral in the right way.

And remember, the time is going to pass anyway, whether you do something about it or not.

As told to Lucy Evans