My friends call me Susan. I have gained a variety of life experience having at different times been a wife, a mother and currently being a single lady. While I was married, my husband was made redundant four times. The first time he was out of work for 2 years, the second time for 3 months, the third time for 1 week and the last time he gave up working for others and became self-employed. This left us with no guaranteed income and the pressure of this contributed towards the demise of our marriage.
Debt can create a spiral that is very difficult to escape from. You borrow a bit but then your income does not meet the bills so you borrow a bit more. You hope that somehow your income will increase so you can make the payments but what happens if it does not. The alternative is to reduce your spending, but what happens if there are good reasons why you cannot do that. Before you know it you are so far in debt that you simply cannot pay everyone so what do you do then? In our case, that spiral contributed towards making other problems in our marriage worse and it proved impossible to save it.
Things were not always as hard as this. When the industry he had worked in disappeared due to national politics, it was difficult to readjust and find a new source of income. We survived as we had a cushion of a redundancy payment so we were able to manage without borrowing any more money. Life was not easy and made no easier by the way the benefit system works. At one time, we could not get all the money we were entitled to because one of the supervisors did not understand why we were entitled to it. They left, and the person under them who knew what was happening was finally able to give us what we were due, and even arranged a back payment. Another problem we had was the way the bank had encouraged us to prepare for the possibility of unemployment was helpful in one sense, but for a three month period left us with no income whatsoever. They recognised they had caused us problems and tried to help us through them but it was not easy. The next time he was out of work we were just thinking that we would have to sell the car, as we could not make the payments when he was offered a job. The third time he was hardly out of work before he was offered a new job. The fourth time held the promise of things working out so much better, but they only became worse.
One of the things that I like to do is to share what I have learnt with others and encourage them not to make some of the same mistakes I have done. Making the Pounds Meet the Ends is an attempt to do just that. I learnt the hard way at times about how to make money go further. During some of these times there was relatively little information circulating about how to live more cheaply. There has always been some information on the internet, as some people have shared their ideas of living more simply, while others have shared how they have managed to survive as a single income family in today's world. Problem is that much of what is on the internet is been based on the American experience but there are some differences in terms of culture.
I have taught IT part time since 1995. During that time I have had to develop my skills to keep up with the requirements of ever-changing qualifcations. One way I have done this is by doing further courses myself, including a Post Graduate Diploma in Multimedia Applications. Now I have these skills I have no excuse not to share what I have learnt with others.