I Took Out a £6,000 Loan to Go on Holiday – Then I Lost My Job

Back in 2019, I took out a £6,000 loan. I used part of it to clear a £2,000 overdraft I had hanging over me and blew the rest. I blitzed through most of it on a trip to Japan and whatever was left by just generally living beyond my means – taking taxis to and from work every day, eating a lot of takeaways, pointlessly spending on mobile games – that kind of stuff. It was nothing specific. I was just lazy, depressed and making things hard for myself. 

When I first took the loan, I didn’t think it would be that bad. The £270 a month repayments seemed doable. But soon after getting back from Japan, I got made redundant from my job. A few months after that, the pandemic was in full-on apocalypse mode. 

Digging myself into such a financial black hole was out of character for me. I had to be quite frugal when I was a kid because I grew up in care. I wanted to move out and live on my own as soon as I possibly could, which meant growing up fast and living on a tiny budget. I moved into something called assisted living from the age of 16 and I had my own council flat soon after my 18th birthday. I survived on £80 a week and that covered bills, food, travel and anything else I wanted to buy. 

I started working from a young age because I didn’t want to just scrape by on handouts. I’ve had loads of jobs since I left college twelve years ago – my first was as a waiter at a catering company, until I found a job as a chef at another place. I stuck to catering for a few years and then moved on to pet insurance – first in customer service and then a management role. That was the job I was made redundant from after I took out the loan. 

After getting made redundant, I sat on my arse and wallowed for a few months. I knew I needed an income to make the loan repayments and get out of debt, so I tried to psych myself up, thinking I’d take any job. I tried sales for an energy firm, but couldn’t hack the hard-selling tactics. It felt too much like conning people. After a short stint in a shelf-stacking role for an agency, I found a job in social care, looking after older and disabled people, at the height of the pandemic.

At first, it was exhausting. I wasn’t in very good shape when I started the job and it’s very physical. I don’t drive, so I cycle appointment-to-appointment – racking up 30 miles on some days. It’s good exercise, but knackering. On the flip side, caring is more fulfilling than my previous jobs. I enjoy forging relationships with the clients, even though given the nature of the job, they all die sooner or later. 

Social care is rewarding, but I’ve seen and done some pretty disgusting stuff. It comes with the territory. When I first started, I looked after a guy who had really bad diarrhoea one day – I cleaned him up and stood him by the toilet so I could change his bed. While I did that he started humming and he was quite happy. That was nice… until he started shitting all over himself. Instinctively, I put out my hand and started catching it. I didn’t know what else to do. There was so much and it wasn’t stopping, so I went in with two hands and started chucking it into the toilet. It was fine in the end, but I had an extra-long bath when I got home after that one. 

The people I look after are usually friendly and I get on with them, but sometimes it’s testing because you have to be patient and kind no matter what happens. This one time a guy I was looking after had a UTI, which can make people aggressive. I had never seen him walk the whole time I had cared for him, but he was kicking and spitting at me and trying to get out of bed to attack me. That was horrible – I had to try to stop him getting up and hurting himself because he couldn’t support his own weight.  

On the face of it, the £11.50 per hour pay is okay, but shifts are broken up into appointments. You only get paid for the time of the appointment that the person is booked in for – no more, no less. On an average week I work 40-50 paid hours. The working day is 7AM until 9-10 at night, but that’s with a few hours of breaks here and there. I’ve never been paid for more than 12 hours on a day like that. But I have been paid less – maybe 10 hours for a day starting at 7AM and ending at 10PM. My highest paid week was for 65 hours, but I probably put in around 90 hours for that. 

For the first six months of the job, I had Tuesdays off, as well as Saturday and Sunday mornings. But since the beginning of this year, I started working every day of the week so I could earn more money. I booked the occasional day off, but there was a period where I worked six to eight weeks straight. It got to the point where if I was working a seven-hour shift, it felt like a day off because it would go by so fast. 

At first, I didn’t mind the hours because I saw the job as exercise. Since starting, I’ve dropped down from 18 stone to around 15 stone. But working so relentlessly has taken its toll. My social life has diminished to almost nothing this year, though I have recently switched to a different job, this time in a care home. There are fewer unpaid breaks, meaning I can work less hours and earn the same money – and hopefully have more time to see friends. 

I committed to working so hard this year because I want to clear my debt and be financially free. It’s the feeling of not having options that gets to me – not being able to go away if I want to, or go out for food with friends. I’ve read that when you borrow money, you’re giving away part of your future to gratify yourself at the time, so all this hard work is going towards something that I’ve already spent. 

Switching jobs means I’m going to be in debt for a while longer than I had planned, because of payday dates. My original goal was to be debt-free by now, but I’ve had a few setbacks. Life happens. The last installment of my loan is due in February next year, but I think I’ll pay it off sooner than that. 

I think working so hard to get out of debt has been worthwhile, despite the sacrifices. I’m not just better off money-wise – I’m also in much better shape physically and I have a more positive mindset compared to a couple of years ago. All of this work has been to get me back to square one and I don’t feel like I’ve seen the full results of my efforts yet. I’m at the beginning again now. That’s actually quite exciting. 

As told to @HaydenVernon