The only thing I have on credit outside of the sob story below (feel free to ignore) is my house mortgage. and a small zero % credit card that has given me a Brompton and a slightly better family PC than strictly necessary.
the rest though:
When middle son was very poorly as a young child he spent nearly a year in Alder Hey and has spent a lot of time back there until very recently. My dad was in the process of dying a drawn out cancer death in Newcastle ad my grandma similar in Leicester. From Manchester i was the closest to grandma and dad was her only child so I was it for relatives and supporting her, my mum quite rightly was focussed on him.
We had to set up a whole new base camp over in Liverpool for at least one of us to be with son 2 whist still maintaining home at home for son1 and daughter 3 (and thank god for wife's parents nearby to look after them) and I was driving to Newcastle, Leicester, Liverpool, Manchester from one of the others almost daily. I had no choice in easy credit times but to finance our whole life on credit cards and loans, especially with us taking so much time off work unpaid after leave ran out and other options exhausted.
We were also paying off the proceeds of having been the victim of a significant identity fraud from a family friend who we let rent our old house when daughter 3 was coming along (last bad time to sell - so we rented to someone we felt we could trust and got savagely burned by that trust) we bought a bigger house in need of a lot of work that we could just about afford a mortgage on as well as the first. Trouble followed our trustworthy pal & she got in with a very bad lot who used our junk mail and her knowledge of us to build up a little empire of fake me's. When we finally rumbled them, they quite literally destroyed that house and disappeared, they left it a shell, no doors - even outside (so the cops wouldn't pursue it as there was no proof it was them as access was insecure), no windows intact, smashed through ceilings, roof & floor, gas pipes and electrical fittings ripped through and the water left running through the place, even the TV aerial cable cut through from the upstairs bedroom window and the cooker we left for her smashed to bits. I was forced to sell it for £30K less than I still owed on the mortgage and Deeds of Covenant are not a customer friendly interest rate even if the bank were ok about stretching the term as the medical disasters unfolded around me.
so yeah, well over 10 years later I'm still paying it back, (I could have CVA'd it but that'd have put me in bother at work and long term would probably have hurt us more that grinding through it) We live in a house and area that does not reflect our income, the kids have foregone all sorts of treats and such that our combined wages should have afforded them, holidays-hahah, Both of us do jobs we don't particularly enjoy but pay better than we need (not extortionate sadly, both well under 40% tax) and as we've paid off one card or loan or hacked some off the overdraft then we rejig things to make the rest faster to pay down or find a better rate on something, but thats got harder recently too.
On the upside though and worth more than every penny and every ounce of heartache and breakdown as the medical things all played out to their conclusions - son 2 if fit well, healthy, happy and living a life free of remission worries & all of the reparation and restoration work on him is done.
