Most people don’t wake up one day and realise they’re in financial trouble. It rarely arrives all at once. It builds gradually as the gap between income and outgoings quietly widens. Being stretched financially has now become so common that it can be hard to know where “normal” ends and “problem” begins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
4.1 million UK adults are currently in problem debt<\/a> and insolvencies are at their highest level since 2010. Yet most people wait far longer than they should before asking for help – often because they’re not sure whether their situation is serious enough, or because the stigma around debt makes it hard to talk about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So here are five signs that your debt may have moved from manageable to problematic and what you can do about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you’re regularly putting food, fuel or utility bills on a credit card – not because it’s convenient, but because there’s no other way to cover them, that’s a significant warning sign. It means your income isn’t stretching to your basic outgoings, and the debt is likely to keep growing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Citizens Advice forecast<\/a> that the average shortfall between income and essential spending for households in a negative budget will rise to around \u00a3396 per month in 2026. For many people in this situation, borrowing becomes a stopgap rather than a choice and the longer it continues, the harder recovery becomes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Minimum payments can feel like you’re keeping on top of things. You’re not falling behind, the lender isn’t calling, and everything looks fine on paper. But minimum payments are designed to keep you paying interest for as long as possible – not to help you clear what you owe. And if you can only afford the minimum each month, then the balance isn’t really going down at all. Someone making only the minimum repayment on the average credit card balance would take 27 years and 8 months<\/a> to clear the debt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Financial anxiety is one of the most common and most overlooked signs of problem debt. If you find yourself lying awake running through numbers, avoiding opening letters, or feeling a knot in your stomach every time your phone rings from an unknown number, it’s already taking a toll on your mental health.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This matters for practical reasons too. Anxiety tends to delay action and when it comes to debt, the sooner you take action then the more options you have.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Balance transfers, borrowing from one place to pay another, dipping into an overdraft to clear a credit card – these aren’t solutions, they’re signs that the total debt isn’t going down. If you’re in a cycle of moving money around to keep things from tipping over, it’s worth taking a step back and looking at the full picture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 1 in 4 UK adults have low financial resilience<\/a> and 40% couldn’t cover a single month’s expenses. If your finances are so stretched that any change in circumstances for instance a car repair or a reduction in your regular hours would push you into real difficulty, you’re closer to problem debt than you might think.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This isn’t a failure. Problem debt is not just a crisis of unemployment or poor choices. The cost of living has put millions of working households under genuine pressure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The most important thing is to take that first step – and to do so sooner rather than later. The options available to you are typically broader the earlier you act. Free, impartial debt advice is available from a number of charitable organisations, details of which can be found here:\u00a0https:\/\/www.moneyhelper.org.uk\/en\/money-troubles<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n An IVA is a formal debt solution for people with a severe unsecured debt problem, who want or need to avoid being declared bankrupt by their creditors. If an IVA may be an appropriate solution for your situation, we’d always encourage you to speak to our team of FCA regulated advisors, to find out how an IVA might be able to help you regain control of your finances.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At IVAorg CIC, we’re a not-for-profit and we put any surplus we generate back into helping people in financial hardship. Find out more about our approach<\/a> here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you’d like to talk to someone confidentially, then you can call us free on 0800 856 8569.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Most people don’t wake up one day and realise they’re in financial trouble. It rarely arrives all at once. It builds gradually as the gap between income and outgoings quietly widens. Being stretched financially has now become so common that it can be hard to know where “normal” ends and “problem” begins. 4.1 million UK …<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":1037,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[80],"tags":[],"ppma_author":[79],"class_list":["post-1036","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-debt-general"],"aioseo_notices":[],"authors":[{"term_id":79,"user_id":12,"is_guest":0,"slug":"emma-corkish","display_name":"Emma","avatar_url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/f82dce9b037b484e27f5507d56ffe53be0e06f50ce4d12ae762021f66257bf94?s=96&d=mm&r=g","0":null,"1":"","2":"","3":"","4":"","5":"","6":"","7":""}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.iva.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.iva.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.iva.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.iva.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.iva.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1036"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.iva.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1036\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1051,"href":"https:\/\/www.iva.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1036\/revisions\/1051"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.iva.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1037"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.iva.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.iva.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.iva.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1036"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.iva.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=1036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}1. You’re using credit to cover everyday essentials<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
2. You’re only making minimum credit card payments<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
3. You’re losing sleep over money<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
4. You’re juggling debt between accounts<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
5. A job loss or unexpected bill would tip you over the edge<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
So what do you do next?<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n