I DIDN'T KNOW WHERE TO TURN ...

. . . I was terrified of losing my property and my marriage, I never realised the extent of my financial problems until my credit cards were declined whilst I was shopping.

My wife and I are parents to a disabled child. When we bought our property, despite receiving some help from the government, we needed to carry out many modernisations to allow wheelchair access for my son.

A lot of the work which was carried out was paid for by credit card, which was affordable at the time as my wife and I were in full time employment. We were aware that the balances on these cards had reached their limits and so opted to take a consolidation loan which would allow us to repay the cards and make a smaller monthly payment at a much lower interest rate.

This did improve our situation for a time, but when my son's condition worsened, my wife was forced to give up work and become our son's full time carer. We found maintaining the repayment for the loan and our mortgage and other expenditure far too difficult, and resorted to using the credit cards again. We were using one card to pay another and only realised how bad the situation had become when my cards were declined doing the weekly shopping at a supermarket. I felt humiliated. When we took stock of what we owed we realised that we had unsecured debts of nearly £60,000 and we were not able to re-mortgage to repay our creditors as we had very little equity.

I was no longer able to make the repayments to my creditors, and was terrified of having to sell my house after all of the work that we had done to make it as comfortable as possible for our son. When we tried to negotiate with our creditors, we felt like we were nothing more than a number. They offered no support and were not at all sympathetic to our situation.

Then my friend referred us to Campbell Dallas Debt Solutions, and after discussing our circumstances, they advised us that a Trust Deed was our best option. We re-mortgaged our property to release the little equity we had available, and then began to make smaller monthly contributions of £250 which meant that we were protected and our creditors could not take any further action against us.

We felt that we could relax knowing that our property was safe and that we had an affordable monthly budget to stick to. We have avoided bankruptcy and knowing that we will be free of our creditors within three years is great.

Mr. R Brown of East Kilbride