You're not alone with debt this Christmas

Why wait until January to get your debt problems under control, when help is already at hand?

At CCCS we sometimes become aware of human behaviour just by monitoring how busy we are.

In the run up to Christmas our Helpline service gets quieter and the number hitting our online debt help service CCCS Debt Remedy slows down. It’s simple - people don’t want to think about their debt problems in the run up to the festive season.

However, every New Year there’s an explosion of activity in our call centre and online, usually as soon as the Christmas credit card bill hits the doormat.

The sad fact is that we expect this coming January to be one of our busiest, so much so that we recruited over 100 extra staff in October to cope with the anticipated demand.

Why wait until January?

No matter how much people want to avoid facing their debt problems in the run up to Christmas we’ve often wondered about the reasoning behind waiting until January to try and resolve them.

We can only imagine how someone with unmanageable debt copes over the Christmas period knowing that when the credit card and store card bills arrive in the New Year that they won’t be able to pay them.

Christmas or not, we would rather that people take positive steps before the holidays, to reduce worry and avoid bottling up more problems over what is meant to be one of the happiest times of the year.

In reality, we often find that clients coming to us in January have often made their situation worse in the run up to Christmas by overspending. This is classic ‘head in the sand’ behaviour and all human beings are capable of it.

Debt and depression

Despite Christmas being a happy time, for many it has other pressures associated with it. Sadly in this day and age many of these pressures are monetary in their origin.

We ‘need’ to buy gifts, we ‘need’ to spend money on food, we ‘need’ to do the rounds of the relatives and we ‘need’ to make an appearance at the Christmas dos. All the time we’re bombarded with advertisements urging us to spend (with the underlying assumption that if we don’t we’ll somehow not enjoy ourselves).

This pressure can build to a crescendo in the days leading up to Christmas and many of our clients have found that they suffered their worst bouts of depression and anxiety in December. It’s sad to feel this way at any time, never mind at Christmas.

Don’t suffer with debt this Christmas

You really don’t need to put yourself through this. Why not start the ball rolling now? It’s a solution that won’t spoil the festivities and won’t mean you end up with an expensive consolidation loan that doesn’t help in the long term.

This year CCCS will help around 400,000 people find solutions to problem debt. Many of these people came to us in January this year when we’re at our busiest, meaning they suffered through Christmas 2010 knowing they had to find help.

There is no need to do this when you can find free and impartial debt advice right now by using our online debt help tool CCCS Debt Remedy. Debt Remedy is confidential and can give a solution in about 20 minutes.

Over Christmas people don’t want to be told what they don’t want to hear, but things are never as bad as you think and debt solutions such as DROs, IVAs or bankruptcy are rarely as scary as they sound and can often release you from the massive pressure of problem debt.

If you have debt you can’t resolve, give yourself a little peace on Earth by knowing what solutions are available. It might be the best present you give yourself this Christmas.

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