I thought about this for a while – owing £40k might seem pretty ridiculous BUT I can see how it could happen if you start your own business. Which I have – and I wouldn’t recommend it in the climate.
You start business and take home next to nothing because you’ve set yourself x amount of time before you make money. Maybe you borrow to set up business – let’s say 5k.
You see the business grow (yippee) and you start to think ‘hurray I’ll soon be paying myself at a reasonable rate’.
But in the meantime you have a couple of horrid bills and stick them on the credit card to await that day (dental work for example, or the essential to everything car falls apart etc). Then the credit crunch happens. There’s a general wobble but it’s just a wobble (August – October 2008) isn’t it? So digging into the overdraft to pay essential bills is just a temporary measure. Isn’t it?
The problem is that the crunch has developed into a recession which has gone on and on – what might have been an excellent business plan five years ago can seem like pie in the sky these days. In discovering this you can end up with debts on many fronts (business and home) and then if any of them are on credit cards with interest at 20%+ it can suddenly get out of hand.
I’ve been lucky not to be in a similar position but I don’t think you *have* to be off the scale stupid to run up debts if you’re self-employed, just mildly over-optimistic. Which wouldn’t be noticed in a boom.
I could be wrong in this case but it’s not an automatic assumption.