Sitting in the Sainsbury’s car park with four noisy children, four screaming cats in carriers and all the household rubbish that wouldn’t fit in the removal van, I stared through the rainy windscreen, wondering how I had gotten us put in this mess.
It was 2004, and for almost five years we lived in a five-bedroom Victorian semi with a finished basement and off-road parking, on one of the most expensive streets in our affluent suburb of Manchester.
I had a desk in the attic next to my daughter-in-law’s bedroom; my young son and his two younger half-sisters had rooms close to ours, on the first floor; there were two reception rooms and a large kitchen diner downstairs, plus a converted basement where my husband worked.
The house was huge, on the corner of a quiet cul-de-sac, and constantly full of the children’s friends. It was such a safe neighborhood that they would ride their bikes and pass through each other’s houses. One day I opened the front door and the seven year old across the street walked past me into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator.
We had parties where guests stayed overnight and on weekends we had big dinners. We were busy, sociable, family-oriented and, I thought, grown-ups. But I was 29 and I didn’t know how to manage my money.
In 2003, Cop Everett received a tax bill so huge she thought it was a printing error.
These days, during the first weeks of April, I always open a new Excel spreadsheet and work on it meticulously. I just did it, a single mouse click belying the seriousness with which I take this task at the start of each exercise.
I am as financially prudent as a parish council in wartime. Because I swore to myself that I would never, ever find myself in the hole I experienced at the time, when an extremely tight budget and the naivety of youth caused me to lose the house I loved.
Until we found him, I had lived with my son, then six, in a rickety but spacious apartment rented above a video store, across the street from a Chinese takeaway restaurant and of a Spar.
When I met my husband, he and his oldest daughter, then eight, moved in with us, and things quickly became cramped. We were getting married – we needed a house that could accommodate all the kids and our work lives, and we needed to be in the catchment area of their schools.
Two years later we had saved enough for a deposit and eventually found one on the market for £260,000. It was 1999, the height of Blairism, and being offered a mortgage worth five times your salary was not unusual.
As the main breadwinner, it never occurred to me to take out salary insurance as a self-employed person or to start saving “just in case”.
Looking back, we were living a frenetic life, doomed to implode. But I was young, optimistic and just thought everything would be okay. Besides, everyone was also functioning on financial woes – eating out, partying, paying for exotic vacations on credit. By comparison, we were feeling pretty frugal with our second-hand Toyota and our travels to Wales.
But even though we never had a problem paying the monthly mortgage, another, much scarier financial iceberg was lurking beneath the surface, and we were sailing straight toward it.
Flic had to sell the much-loved five-bedroom Victorian semi so he could use the equity to pay the tax bill.
For the first few years of my writing career, my tax bill was negligible. I knew that in my late 20s I was earning a lot more, but the money seemed to flow as soon as it arrived. I worked so hard to support my family, pay the mortgage and household bills that I never thought to check my annual income.
I had been saving more than usual for my taxes, and although I negotiated payment deadline extensions for a few years, in 2003 I received a tax bill so huge that I thought This was a printing error. Added to the amount still outstanding from the previous year, it came to around £30,000. This was partly because I forgot to send the forms in on time and HMRC added daily interest.
I didn’t have £30,000 in my bank account. When the panic attack and sobbing subsided, I called my accountant for advice. He could only suggest that I call HMRC and explain my mistake.
But although he agreed to a grace period of a few months, I was unable to raise the necessary sum. I was called to a meeting at the tax office that felt a lot like an eviction in the principal’s office, and was told that I was “drinking in the last chance lounge.”
I had no money, and after several days of agonizing, my husband and I agreed that the only option was to put the house on the market and use the equity to pay the tax bill.
This wouldn’t have bothered me too much if it hadn’t been for the kids, eventually settling in with lots of local friends. I couldn’t explain why we were selling – there were 13, ten, eight and six of them. We just said it was too expensive. They accepted, even though they feared having to move. I made a solemn vow not to do it.
It took nine months to find a buyer, during which time a bailiff visited the site. He looked at my vintage clothes, china and books and decided we didn’t have anything worth taking.
The constant stress, the constant letters from HMRC adding interest to the debt, the pressure to keep the house perfect for viewings took their toll. I was ashamed and terrified.
We finally exchanged in May 2004 and moved into a large terraced house with four bedrooms and a garden the size of a postage stamp. I felt both terrible guilt and enormous relief.
The children adapted, we survived and lived there for nine years until they grew up. But even though my income declined over time, I never took my eyes off the financial situation again.