Do you live with debt?

[Gandalf]

Furthermore, I hate the way when you start a thread similar old threads come up beneath. Every time I seem to have started a similar thread about a year before. How am I supposed to remember all these threads I have started? Clearly there are character patterns at work and my psycho analyst would have a field day with some of this material.

[erics44]

My debts are my house and i am £150 overdrawn in one account and about £500 in another

my wife is out of work at the minute so that why the overdrafts are creaping up a bit

[Gandalf]

A mortgage is something I can kind of understand. People do need a home to live in and rents can be expensive and you get nothing for it. But the interest over 20 odd years is a killer and you are pretty much tied to it. A mortgage is a seriously hardcore investment, you need to make sure that job is permanent and you can stay on top of things. I'm not sure I would ever want to take on that kind of debt. Extremely risky in this day and age.

[erics44]

A mortgage is something I can kind of understand. People do need a home to live in and rents can be expensive and you get nothing for it. But the interest over 20 odd years is a killer and you are pretty much tied to it. A mortgage is a seriously hardcore investment, you need to make sure that job is permanent and you can stay on top of things. I'm not sure I would ever want to take on that kind of debt. Extremely risky in this day and age.

you will always need somewhere to live tho, even if you rent you cant just decide you cant afford it anymore and stop

[Gandalf]

A mortgage is something I can kind of understand. People do need a home to live in and rents can be expensive and you get nothing for it. But the interest over 20 odd years is a killer and you are pretty much tied to it. A mortgage is a seriously hardcore investment, you need to make sure that job is permanent and you can stay on top of things. I'm not sure I would ever want to take on that kind of debt. Extremely risky in this day and age.

you will always need somewhere to live tho, even if you rent you cant just decide you cant afford it anymore and stop

True, and I think that is a valid point. Mortgage debt is sometimes a necessary thing and I can see that. It is still fairly risky though and there is no guarantee that one is going to be employed all that time. At least with rent you can find something cheaper when things go wrong. There is never any excuse for never having banked some coin though and when things are tough you always need at least a little shrapnel to tide you over. A mortgage should be viewed as a life and death struggle and in many cases it probably is at some point.

[AdamGB]

I have about £600 of a debt which is going down each month.

I have a few hundred on a credit card and I'm usually a few hundred overdrawn.

My out goings are pretty much the same as my income so I spend what I earn. Most of the debt came from when I was in between jobs and it's not going down quicker because I've been investing a lot into my business recently.

[BIG H]

When I was 23 years old I had £23,000 of debt in loans and credit cards, now I have virtually nothing and don't even use a credit card (the evil of the world!)

[Gandalf]

Also with these expensive tuition fees and banks lining up to fleece the new teenage consumers that debt is almost being ingrained into society. Debt is being seen as a natural state of affairs, unless you are the super rich and it shouldn't be that way. If schools can offer sex education classes, then they should also provide money management classes and counter the predatory financial institutions, but of course the state wouldn't really want to encourage that.