Well the IVAs been approved and your worries are over, or are they?

You can’t wait to get paid and make your first payment into your IVA so as soon as payday comes you draw out all your remaining money and place it carefully into piles: housekeeping, petrol, electric, phone etc. Your mortgage and IVA payments have already gone out of your bank and now all you are left with are your living expenses for the month. Easy.

 Well the first two weeks are fine and you are on track. The weekends are a bit different now, very quiet, but you know that it’ll be worth it. Five years isn’t that long.

 It’s the third week of the month and your friends have invited you and your partner out for a meal etc, they don’t know that your on a strict budget but what the hell you think, it’s only one evening, you’ll be good and spend only a little.

 The evening is great, it has been a few weeks since you’ve been out and you remind yourself about how hard you work. You both deserve a night out.

 Soon, as the wine flows, you forget about your IVA and just enjoy yourself. It’s a great night.

 You wake the next morning and the first thing that you think about is the £100 that you spent. Oh dear.

 It’s the final week of the month and because of your night out you only have £90 left and you need £30 of that for petrol for the week. You go around the supermarket on a budget: no wine, no cakes, just the bare necessities. At the checkout you have to put a couple of items back, how embarrassing.

 The weekend is bleak and boring, you have no money at all, just a few pence until its payday again and that’s a week away.

 You vow never to waste money again on a night out.

 It’s going to be a very hard five years you tell yourself. You never thought that it would be this hard but the reality of an IVA is so different to how you imagined it to be. Then again you’ve never had to live on a budget before.