Are we the only ones struggling? Feeling very alienated and lonely here

[Mum2SweetCs]

Hi Ella,

Definitely not the only one struggling. We have been thinking of a second child for a long time and DH always brings me back to reality that we will be struggling big time when we do (and I'm not even pregnant yet) We cannot survive on his wage so I have to go back to work full time to be able to pay the mortgage (we dont have paid maternity leave at work).

At the moment we are looking of ways to cut our budgeting down but I guess it doesn't help when we both aren't really good at saving money!

We dont have pay tv and only have internet as I need it to work from home.

I try to use vouchers when i can and go online to find which store coles/woolies/aldi have specials on and write a list of which store has what specials to get food on special to save a few bucks (i guess it all adds up)

I definitely hope things look up for you soon and we are all ears when you need a place to vent.

[Ella]

I get what you mean about your DH's. DF sees his smokes + ice breaks + couple of bourbon cans a night as his escape and release from the stress we are under. I have tried to explain to him that I don't get to have any of these escapes because there is no money left but he doens't get it, he tells me to buy somethign then and doesn't see that if I did we would be in more trouble. We he gets mad he lays on the 'but I work and my pay pays for everything we have and the food that goes into your mouth.' That upsets me so much, when will something make them realise that what we do at home each day when we look after kids is work, its hard and tiring and yes I may get to be at home all day, but there are times when I would kill to stand behind a counter and talk to adults!

I also understand what someone was saying about not telling people because you will feel embarrased, but I have learnt from experience that if you tell people that you just want their understanding not their charity then understanding is usually what you get. If you don't say anything, you feel ashamed when you say no to going out to somethign and have to make an excuse, if you do say something then people aren't going to pity you, perhaps they will understand and not feel like you're making something up. We have had to go to charity's in the past wehn things got really bad and I won't lie, it was embarrassing, but the truth is I have always given when I could to those charitys and they are there for people who go through times of crisis, there's no judgement when they speak to you.

Thank you all for replying, its really nice to get peopel talking about it, not so that we can wallow in self pity but just so that we can share helpful tips and empathise with each others stories.

[Little Chicken]

Hi Ella,

Actually no we didn't have a problem getting a lease but we have only been through one real estate agent. I think it helps though if you have a stable financial record with your agent, eg never missing or being late with a payment. Also, and I never knew this, most of the cheap insurance agencies, even some of the big name ones, will not insure a bankrupt or will hike thier premiums right up. So if you need to change policies do it now. I know about the phone calls, we were going to have the baliff put our house up for auction for a $20,000 business debt, but the bank now gets the house ( we were actually ahead in payments, business mortgage took it). Also, sorry used that word before, if you have more then $6000 equity in your car the trustee is entitled to take it and sell it to recoup some money. I know I sound all doom and gloom, but I find it's good to know all the ramifications of something, and somethings you don't get told till after. Like if you have a passport you have to give it to the trustee and you cannot leave the country for the next 3 years and one day with out thier permission (and they can refuse). You are actually put on the watchlist and cannot physically leave without that permission.

You know, I have hardly told anyone outside of my family that we are bankrupt, and it is actually liberating to do so. I hope my experience can be helpful to others.

[Doing my best]

Your not alone. We were in this boat even before DH took a paycut for 6 months. DH wouldn't look at the budget cause he didn't want to see how bad it was.. I broke down and told him how hard it was to pay everything with nothing, and him not totally understanding.. We signed a loan for another large amount for shares on top of our mortgage just before having DD.. In hindsight, it was a mistake, but it is a commitment that we have to honour.. Not long after I went on maternity leave for DD, DH's overtime dried up, and so we have been living week to week, pay to pay since then.

DH also didn't want me working. But it was either that or we would be sinking fast. I had to work full time for a few weeks, but it eventually led to part time work, but even with 2 kids in f/t daycare, it kept us afloat, just.

It does help if you talk about it.. You will find that many people won't bring up the topic, but they will not deny it if they realise they aren't alone.

Hope you come to some peace in your situation soon.. Stressing about money is not good at the best of times, but especially not with a young child and another on the way, cause they can sense it. Also is there any parks within walking distance to take DS to? The fresh air will do both of you good, and things never seemed as bad for me after some fresh air.

[Ella]

Muminalice- you have no idea how helpful it is. We have 2 cars, one being worth $1000 and the other about $3000, so we should be safe there. We have no savings or equity that tehy should take according to the lady I spoke to from the bankruptcy advisory line, also we don't have passports lol. Unfortunately we don't have a good record with our estate agent as our rent got pretty behind at one point nad it took us a while to crawl back up. I guess we will have to hope they will let us stay here for a while. Either that or we better move before we go bankrupt lol It is all pretty doom and gloom and I was so against it for a long time but after having realised we can either bust our asses and be depressed for the next ten years trying to pay off these debts and still have credit defaults for 3 years once they're clear which could be 15 years, I realised that the reality of being on a bankruptcy list for 7 years isn't so bad, I know its on record for life but also know there are people out there who still go on to own houses and stuff like taht. If they can do it so can we. I also realise now that its better this has happened now when we are so young because it means we have learnt these very hard lessons relatively early in life instead of learning them later when we have so much more to lose.

Sorry that was a bit of a blab, just feels good to be talking about it openly.

[Rivlas]

We struggled on one waged all the time. It's only now that the DD's have grown up that we are starting to get ahead.
One thing I found that really helped was to get a book, rule up columns and account for every cent. It can be on a spreadsheet, this was before we had a computer. I had one for bill, groceries, spending, savings??, medical, presents etc. We were amazed at how much we could waste on small things.
We had a credit card with a $300 limit which was only to be used in an extreme emergency.
Another thing we did was when we had $10 to spare we were allowed to have takeaway, usually fish & chips. It was the light at the end of the tunnel and something to look forward to.

[Freya]

Your not the only ones

Unfortunately these days not even big numbers in front of a few 000's means yours well off. We have people thinking that all the time, and yeah I'll admit we are certainly well above the poverty line its only through sheer luck and determination. We still have skint weeks where we are left with less than $100 after paying out expenditures.

I def ditto everyone else on getting rid of every luxury you can, including any bad habits if possible ie alcohol or smoking, because you have to weigh up your priorities - financial stability or non essential items. We still occasionally have luxuries ie dinner out or a bottle of alcohol; but mostly we try extremely hard to avoid it. Having enough money isnt always painless or easy. Esp where kids are involved because even with being bargain savvy they still cost a bit of $$$.
One big tip from me is NO CREDIT CARDS EVER! We have never had a credit card. Not even for a few hundred dollars. I think when you do its just so easy to use it thinking "I'll pay it back" but it never happens and then your in over your head. Banks count on that. If you cannot afford to get cash out and pay for it then you dont need it. If you are going to struggle to pay a bill; call your provider and work out a payment plan. Better to pay your provider than a credit card company with 1000% interest whacked on top.

Grocery shopping is our downfall. There always ends up being more useless stuff than useful stuff in my trolley esp if I go shopping with family in tow *sigh* Im starting to meal plan 3x main meals + 2 snacks a day and sticking to that, it definately cuts the food bill alot. Might not be gourmet but its cost effective. I dont go for brands anymore if I can avoid it; I buy in bulk if its a super bargain.

I really hope you begin to feel better about your situation soon. Its horrible worrying about money; physically exhausting infact. But it comes with being a grown up (and earning under $100,000 these days). Sucks.

[luna moth]

I really hope you begin to feel better about your situation soon. Its horrible worrying about money; physically exhausting infact. But it comes with being a grown up (and earning under $100,000 these days). Sucks.

I have a friend on 100K, and her DP is on 60K. It's a massive amount and they still struggle. It's not about the amount, it's about the way you handle it.
Defs check out the frugal living blogs, live cheap and be proud. I honestly adore the feeling when someone says "I love your dress." and I can say "Three bucks at Salvos!" It's not embarrassing at all - I find it actually makes people a little jealous that I can do so much with so little. It started when I was a student, working part-time, and DH was on a piddly PhD stipend - $200 a week in the first year, then $400 a week for the next two years. So we really had no choice. When I started working full time and on a higher wage we decided not to change anything - we were so used to it anyway. Then when he took his first grad job, we just kept going that way.

We commented last night (when we burned a chair that had broken ) about how I get more attached to free/cheap furniture than I do to stuff we have paid for. It's because brand new stuff can be easily replaced - you just go back to the shop and buy it again. But stuff off the side of the road, well, you can't just go back to the roadside and find it again! I get a big thrill from the opportunity. Cheap thrills

[Freya]

Oh yeah great suggestion Audax! You can most definately find some awesome clothing and furniture at op shops! I got most of Ds1's baby bits and peices from op shops and garage sales. I just the other week went and spent $30 at the Salvo's and got 3 skirts, a cardigan, a peasant top, a sleepsack for Ds3, 8 pairs of socks for the kids, a novel and a cool 60's vintage dress. I love going every few weeks and seeing what I can find! Some of my most prized clothing or books or shoes are op shop peices.

Im terrified of how much the cost of living is going to keep increasing in the next decade. Its ridiculous and I think in some ways avoidable on the Governments behalf. Dh always says "the rich are getting richer but the poor are getting poorer; and the middle class is disappearing, soon we'll all be poor unless we're born into money".

[Antheia]

Trust me, you're not the only one. The only way i have found works is to make a budget of everything that needs paying each week. For the bills, i pay $10-$30 on each depending on how much they are each month and i take a calculator with me to do the grocery shopping so i don't go over budget. We have avoided credit cards on purpose so we dont have debt. The only debt we do have is our mortgage.

[AnyDream]

I haven't read through the thread but plan to come back to it.

One thing I've noticed with the benefit of being older (now in my late 30s) we are now comparitively a lot better off then we were in our 20s...even though we are on 1 income, it's worth more now than it was then just due to DH's increased seniority...also we're paying the same on the homeloan as we were in the past when we were in desperate straights BUT if push comes to shove we have the fallback of being able to borrow more just because our house has increased in value over that time. I also have more things of value that we have accumulated over the years so even though we don't have $$ to spend right now (and it's a real scrape to get the bills etc paid), we still live more comfortably than we did 10 years ago and I don't feel 'poor" like I did then, even though things are tight.

[Asparagus and Lemons]

Audax.. are you talking about hard garbage? things on the side of the road? We do that often, but we go really late at night so people dont see us. Although it does depends on the area we go to. In the 'upperclass areas' when people are outside their houses, we have had people actually yell things at us! They'll say "Scabs!" or "Stop looking through our rubbish!" it makes me really upset but it doesnt stop dh doing it. We have found items on hard garbage, and then sold them for hundreds! It is worth it, and we have not paid full price for any of our furniture.. the stuff we did pay for was from ebay or the deseased estate auctions.
An also dh's brother never has money and often asks us for money or when dh buys him something he can never pay it back straight away. I dont get that as he and his wife BOTH work full time and they both have decent jobs. We are living on one wage of 50 grand a year and we dont get any benifits! We get $974 a week, we pay $560 for our mortgage a week, $175 for the car loan a week.. and so SOMEHOW with $239 we have to pay 2 mobiles, the phone line, gas, electricity, internet, food, petrol and possibly pay off the $8000 we owe on the credit card. It never adds up in the plus's

[Arimeh]

Its super hard on one wage, definitely hard. I have to re-work our budget again because of interest rates going up so our mortgage repayment is more - so that means something has to go!! I'd love to have a cheaper plan on my mobile (at the moment its $80 a month) but its up in November, and if I cancel it now, I have to pay it all out - and we just can't afford it. So thats the plan from November.

I don't buy clothes unless they are in the bargain bin at Kmart (great huh - got a great singlet the other day for $5 - reduced from $20!!) and I buy most of the kids clothes secondhand from other people on the net, or ebay. They hardly ever get any new clothes, and if they do - they're on the reduced racks too from Kmart. If they come shopping with me, I buy them a $2 toy or something - but its rare that they come with me these days, just too expensive - even those $2 toys add up!!!

I do our meal plans, and some of the meals are enough for 3 meals, so that means that I can get 6 weeks worth of one meal (cos my plan is for a fortnight). Also have a few vegetarian meals on there too, a can of chick peas is MUCH cheaper that meat!! Plus meals like toasted cheese sangas, or baked beans, every meal like that just saves a bit more money from having to be spent on meat.

I don't know about the difficulty of finding a rental once declaring bankruptcy, but I do know that down here in tassie they ask for a credit rating report when applying for properties - so maybe that is something they take into account?

- its so very hard out there these days xxx

[Astrid]

Unfortunately these days not even big numbers in front of a few 000's means yours well off. We have people thinking that all the time, and yeah I'll admit we are certainly well above the poverty line its only through sheer luck and determination. We still have skint weeks where we are left with less than $100 after paying out expenditures.

Same here. MIL cannot understand why we are often broke, but back when she was raising kids the cost of living was much cheaper. It was easy to have a mate service the car, you could scrounge for change to get petrol. The basic cost of living costs so much more these days, even the food they could not sell 30 years ago, is now expensive. Yes we can do some things better, but it sucks when people think you should be doing very well.

Grocery shopping is our downfall. There always ends up being more useless stuff than useful stuff in my trolley esp if I go shopping with family in tow *sigh*

Hear you on that one. Had one great grocery shop, that I then realised should have been much better. DH had put $26 of crap in the trolley $5 I was fine with, but not $26!

We commented last night (when we burned a chair that had broken ) about how I get more attached to free/cheap furniture than I do to stuff we have paid for. It's because brand new stuff can be easily replaced - you just go back to the shop and buy it again. But stuff off the side of the road, well, you can't just go back to the roadside and find it again! I get a big thrill from the opportunity. Cheap thrills

I worry more about the things that cost almost nothing. The designer skirt that was $9 etc, as I know if I was able to find something similar, it would cost me more than 10 times that amount.

[widdly]

DH got into money trouble when he was about 19 years old and he declared bankruptcy. It never ever effected him or us finding rentals (and we have had more than our fair share of rentals). After the 7 years or whatever it is of bankruptcy we applied for a home loan and it took a lot of effort from our home loans guy to find us someone who would lend us the money due to the bankruptcy. We ended up having to pay quite a large interest rate on our home loan due to the bankruptcy. DH is now 34 and his past bankruptcy never ever comes up for any reason, he has car loans and personal loans aplenty (whole nother thread...) with no trouble getting them at all. We sold our house a few years ago to move away, and I assume that because we have had one house loan now since the bankruptcy that he wont have any trouble getting another house loan one day.

Just htought I'd share, amy help you out x

[Cherished]

Hi Ella, I haven't read everyones responses to your post so sorry it I am doubling up, I just wanted to quickly offer you some advice

We don't really talk to others about our money/finance because we know many people are doing it tough and we are doing 'ok' right now so don't want to seem insensitive. If people ask how we manage we are happy to tell them with the hope that they can reduce some of the stress surrounding their own situation. Basically when dh and I met 4 years ago we were thousands of $$$ in debt between the both of us. Since then we have paid that off, built a new house and furnished it with all new furniture including the big flat screen tv lol and purchased a new 2nd hand car. Now the only debt we have is the home loan. Most of the other stuff we bought outright there and then or with the bigger stuff we put it on GE and paid it off in the interest free time frame. We did this by allocating the money each fortnight to pay it off and kept it aside as if we had been paying it back to GE but that money was actually in our home loan account offsetting our home loan. The same goes for our credit cards, we purchase everything on them to get points and to make it easier to keep track of things and then we allocate the money aside each fortnight as if we had actually paid for it with cash rather than the credit card. That way when the bill comes we already have the money for it and never pay interest on the credit cards. The same goes for every living expense we have, the money is 'allocated' well before the bill comes in so we don't have to worry about having the money when it arrives. I can hear you saying "that's all fine if you have the money in the 1st place" which is true. The bottom line is that you either need to cull your living expenses until they do not exceed your joint income or you need to make more money. If your time is already full with working the hours you do than the only option is to get a higher paid job or to cull your living expenses. Then get yourselves out of debt and then once that's done you can start saving some money and you will slowly climb out of the rut. This really does take commitment from both you and your dh, you both have to be prepared to 'happily' go without to make sure your expenses don't exceed your income or 'happy' to work more hours or 'happy' to change to a higher paid job, 'happy' to sell everything you don't use or really need anymore 'happy' to down grade your cars or even 'happy' to move house or town to cull your living expenses. I hope that all makes sense and I haven't rambled too much!

[Ella]

Thanks everyone for replying, I must say that after having read everyones tips and stories this morning, the world isn't changing and I haven't discovered a way to save $1000 a week but I am starting to think more positively and getting a few ideas. I'm going to start a thread to get some people to lend me their meal plan lists that they do up for a week and see if I can do one of them. We eat very frugally but I'm sure there's another $5 I can save somewhere. Also I think I might go have another look at some more op shops this week as I'm in need of some maternity clothes and they're just too expensive from normal shops.

Thanks again and keep the stories coming. It's truly inspiring to hear from so many people of different walks of life!

[Mum2SweetCs]

Thinking positive is a great step!

With regards to mat clothes, i never bought any. I cut the front part of the elastics off my tights (which i got for $6 at SES (cheap store) and they worked great and i bought those baby doll dresses which you can also wear after your pregnancy.

Mat clothing is too expensive anyway.

hth