The Work Is Real. The Pay Won't Stay Still.
I take every shift the rota gives me. Some months it pays enough. Some months it doesn't. The bills are the same either way.
“I didn't borrow because I stopped working. I borrowed because the work stopped: briefly, repeatedly, without warning. And the bills didn't stop with it.”
The rota goes up on Tuesday evenings. I check it the moment the notification comes through, the same way other people check their payslip on payday. The next two weeks of my life, what I'll earn, what I can afford, what I might have to defer, all of it resolved in a few seconds on an app.
That is the shape of the work. And it is the shape of the work, more than any individual decision, that explains why I am £26,000 in debt.
How the money moves
In a good month, I can cover rent, bills, food and the minimum payments with a little over. Not much over. But enough to feel like things are under control. In a quiet month, January through March is reliably difficult, the income does not reach the bills.
The bills are not flexible. The rent comes out on the same date every month. So does the Council Tax, the energy direct debit, the phone contract, the minimum payments on the two cards. None of those amounts shift to reflect what happened to my hours that week.
For the first couple of years I managed the quiet months by carrying the difference on the overdraft. Quiet about it, careful, always planning to pay it back when the busier weeks came in. And sometimes I did. But there is something about irregular work that is hard to explain unless you have lived inside it: the gap between a full week and a cancelled one is large, and the cancelled week arrives without warning. A shift pulled the night before. A booking that evaporated. Two weeks in March where the work simply was not there, and no one told me why.
What the quiet weeks cost
Statutory sick pay currently runs at around £123 a week. Not everyone in my situation qualifies: you need to have earned above the lower earnings limit in the relevant assessment period, and if your recent weeks have been short, you might not clear that threshold. A week of illness can mean a week of nothing coming in at all.
I want to be specific about what the debt actually paid for. The two credit cards, the personal loan, the overdraft: nothing in that £26,000 is from a holiday, or a television, or anything I couldn't have justified to someone sitting across the table. It is groceries in a short month. A car repair, because without the car there are no sites to get to. An energy bill that hit the same week the shift was cancelled. A few hundred pounds here, a few hundred there, each time borrowed as a bridge to next month.
The bridge lasted five years before I stopped thinking of it as a bridge.
Once the minimum payment becomes part of the fixed costs, another monthly direct debit, as regular as the rent, the gap between the income and the bills quietly widens.
The Universal Credit problem
At one point I applied for Universal Credit during a slow stretch. The system is designed for exactly that situation.
But Universal Credit calculates monthly, and the taper rate, 55p withdrawn for every extra pound earned above the work allowance, means that a busy fortnight at the end of the month can dramatically reduce the next month's payment, even if the following month turns out to be quiet. Earnings smooth out over time, in reality. Universal Credit assesses one month at a time. The volatility of the work and the system's response to that volatility run out of sync.
The upshot is that a good week does not reliably protect you in the next assessment period. And that makes planning around the two income sources together, wages and Universal Credit, genuinely difficult. They do not move in the same rhythm.
What the balance is now
I know exactly what the balance is. Two credit cards, an overdraft that has become as permanent as any other direct debit, and a consolidation loan from three years ago that now runs alongside a second card opened when the consolidation wasn't enough.
Twenty-six thousand pounds. Not growing fast, because I make the payments. Not shrinking fast either, because the interest absorbs most of what I send each month on the minimum. I spoke to StepChange, free, no appointment required, and they did not make me feel like I had done something wrong. They showed me the arithmetic. They helped me see what options might actually change the pace.
The debt is not the result of stopping work. I work whenever the rota lets me. The debt is the result of work that will not stay still, applied to bills that will not move with it.
If that description feels familiar, the best thing I did was make that call to StepChange. Not because they had an instant answer. Because they helped me see the whole picture at once, which I had spent five years avoiding.