Hi robs67,
In case it turns out that you and your wife are not eligible for any state benefits, I'd suggest taking some practical steps into helping your financial issues. Here's some tips I suggest you can look into, you may already be doing some or all of these!
1. Benchmark yourself. Deep breath, and boring bit ahead, gather all your finanical elements and sit down and write them down for say a monthly overview. Include everything, all cash transactions, all spending, no matter how small. This is also referred to as a SOA - Statement of Affairs. You'll be able to see a breakdown of all your spending and of course your income.
2. Evaluate, discuss and begin formulating a plan of what expenditure can be cut and by how much in order to begin helping you make a positive adjustment to your goal of better being able to make ends meet. - examples are, taking a packed lunch to work, cutting the heating timer by an hour each day, walking to local shops instead of the car, perhaps coming one peg down on the phone/internet service plan etc etc.
3. Keep monitoring your spending over the forthcoming months as you implement those changes.
4. Use financial software to help you track everything - you'll find the reports these packages can generate very useful.
5. Look to ways of increasing your income, perhaps a part time job, maybe selling off unneeded items on ebay, offering to do some paid work via newspaper classified i.e tutoring, or a skill you can charge time for. Is there the possibility of over time at your job? perhaps look to changing employers to increase your wages/pay leevel. Perhaps take some extra courses to bolster your skillset/CV/Resume and then look to better paying jobs andlastly the possibility of starting your own small business in a skill you know about?
I understand some of these will involve startup or up-front costs, but the long term payoff could be well worth it.
Hope the above helps - good luck!
DtM! West London & Slough UK!
