How Did We Get Here?

So how did I get in the position I find myself in today? It's difficult to know how detailed I should be in revealing my personal circumstances and by default those of my wonderful wife. It strikes me that if I don't give the 'warts and all' version then my Blog could just be a diary of events without providing any useful information to those in similar situations, so I have decided rightly or wrongly and with the full support of my wife to be as detailed as I can, without compromising our integrity.

Here goes with the background.

I'm 48 and my wife is 46 and we have been together for 26 very happy years. 

In January 2005 I left a very well paid, but very stressful position as a company director. I left not knowing what I was going to do next, but was not overly worried as I had a decent nest egg to give me time to reevaluate my life and decide what I wanted to do. After a couple of months of much soul searching and deciding what was important in our lives, my wife and I decided we would go into business together (dangerous I know, but our relationship was and still is very strong) After a short search we found what we thought would be the ideal lifestyle business that would see us through to retirement. We bought a village pet shop.

Years one, two and three were very difficult but we managed to get through them relatively unscathed. Years four and five began to see some rewards for our efforts. We broke even year four and actually made a small profit year five. However there was already a cost to getting into this position. For five years we had worked seven days a week from 7:30 until 5:30 with the exception of Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Years Day. Tiredness was starting to kick in and it was difficult maintaining the same sort of enthusiasm we had at the beginning. Thankfully our relationship was still strong and we managed to keep each other up when we were down.

Then at the start of year six the sign of things to come started to rear its ugly head. Takings were down, regular customers were clearly spending less than they had in the previous five years, unemployment was beginning to creep up in the surrounding areas. The media were telling us on an almost daily basis that we were in recession and that the world was doomed. Now with hindsight (isn't it a wonderful thing) we should have called a halt there and then and closed the business. We weren't in any debt at that point with anyone other than our mortgage company and by that I don't mean arrears, I just mean we still owed on our mortgage.

However, being the eternal optimist and also being more than a little stubborn, I refused to lie down and die and was determined to make things work. Unfortunately my hunter/gatherer attitude has ultimately proved to be our downfall. 

Year seven, the present year, has been nothing less than a complete disaster. Business has taken a nosedive of mammoth proportions and all the debt we have accumulated has effectively occurred in this past year as we desperately tried to hang on.

So there you have the background. In my next Blog I'll detail the debts we have and what our plan is so far.

Sorry for the overlong post, but I thought the background kind of helps put things in context.