Contrary to a growing number of reports in the media, walking the bankruptcy tightrope is no easy option. Financially shackled you face, probably near on a decade, repairing your credit rating. Initially life will be turned on its head, struggling on a tight budget while you try to come to terms with your new life as a bankrupt – Do not take this decision lightly.
FALLOUT – Early days of bankruptcy (march 2006)
Diary Extracts: Bankrupt 130 of 2006"The hardest thing in the first few weeks is having access to your money. The lowest point being how to stretch a £20 note to filling the car with petrol, buying a weekly train ticket to London and feeding four people sufficiently without causing malnutrition."
It had only been four weeks since that dreaded day. And it had passed in a blur.
So many forms to fill in, expenditure lists, telephone calls about how much petrol we were using, how we were spending too much on food for a family of four each month and, even worse, a house valuation to see if we had to sell up and move out. The thought of liasing with the Official Receiver filled me with terror. Surprisingly enough, she was quite human. But still we had to account for every penny in our lives and had to satisfy her with our sums, a harder task than you think when you are living life on autopilot. There have been days when I opened my eyes and thought, how could I face another day? Put one foot in front of another, but you do. You drag yourself up and get on with it, dealing with the destruction of the fallout from the atomic bomb, which has been dropped on top of your lives.
Firstly, you are faced with informing everyone and anyone that you have gone bankrupt.The ‘so don’t bother asking me because you will not get anything, leave me alone’ type letters, are a must as The Official Receiver will not get round to doing this for sometime and you need to keep the pack of wolves, in the form of bailiffs, from your door. I thought saying those words out loud at the courthouse was bad enough but to then actually put it in print was equally as bad, if not worse. It was now on file in my handwriting - bankrupt. There is no denying it. So far I had learned an awful lot since our bankruptcy petition was lodged. If I were to do it all again I would do things very differently – and this I want to share with you. At least you will have choices, something that many who walked the high wire before you never had.
The hardest thing in the first few weeks is having access to your money. The lowest point being how to stretch a £20 note to filling the car with petrol, buying a weekly train ticket to London and feeding four people sufficiently without causing malnutrition. Yes, true you will have access to your account again if the Official Receiver is content that all monies are justified in paying household bills and living expenses. But in our experience this process took in excess of six weeks. It is at this point that I open the Sunday newspaper and no, this was not paid for out of the £20, it was ‘borrowed’ from a newspaper office where my husband worked part time. Wendy Turner, former TV presenter and sister of Anthea Turner, blabbing on about how wonderful bankruptcy was and how she was not going to be making any cuts and would continue shopping at her local Waitrose. Is the woman mad, could it have anything to do with a new book soon to be published?
The real motive for this ridiculous article is unknown, but apparently, with just weeks before a decision is to be made about whether she would be keeping her home, all us bankrupts need to be told over our Sunday bagel that life is sweet and it is the best thing that could ever happen. Not only does she insist on making us (collective bankrupts) all look as if taking the plunge into bankruptcy is ‘a cop out’ and that we didn't need to face up to our responsibilities but she also failed to take into account the risk to her home and disruption to family life. She implied that she had spare cash to throw around. This will, I am sure, be frowned upon by the Official Receiver.
In an attempt to forget the article, still furious, I set about focusing on our own financial demise.
