Life is bigger than debt

My dad killed himself because he was in debt Sarah's * stepfather killed himself when he was unable to pay the mortgage on the family home. That was nearly 16 years ago. "Our family has never really recovered" she says. "He went out one night and he wasn't there in the morning. He'd taken his car up to one of the hills near our house and gassed himself using a hosepipe." Sarah later discovered it was an unsigned letter from the bank that tipped him over the edge. "He had a business and interest rates suddenly went up," she says, "so it was getting more and more difficult to pay his loans back. If only he'd spoken to us about it. It was 16 years ago but it still hurts. My mum gets angry every time it's mentioned so we just don't talk about it now. There's so much he could have done, though. It's not the end." (*name changed)

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Do you owe thousands of pounds? Help is at hand.

Stories of people taking drastic measures because they see no way out of debt are sadly, not unfamiliar. In 2005, a man killed himself after amassing £130,000 debts on credit cards. Wendy Cullen had no idea the scale of her husband Richard's debts, he had 22 different credit cards until his death. He left the house on 10 January,  telling his wife he was going to France. But on 12 January Mr Cullen's lifeless body was found, inside his car with its windows blocked by blankets.

You don't have to be hundreds of thousands in debt to feel overhwhelmed.

• The average interest paid by British households is £3,500 a year, according to Creditaction, a debt charity.

• Britain's personal debt is increasing by £1 million every four minutes. 

• The number of calls to the Consumer Credit Counselling Service increased by 50 per cent to 300,000 in 2006. 

• Citizens Advice Bureaux deal with nearly 1.5 million debt problems a year, in other words, about 5,000 new debt problems every day.

•  Bankruptcies, which topped 100,000 last year, look set to rise again, as do house repossessions. About 300 people are becoming insolvent every day.

If you are worried about how much money you owe remember there is help available - much of it free. We've added lots of advice to Moneymagpie as well as links and details of some specialist free debt advisers in our Get Out of Debt section.

Take your time to look at some of the advice we have here:

First: sort out your head

Second:  deal with the companies you owe money to

Third: what to do if you really do want to go bankrupt

Finally: clean up your credit record and move on

Also, hear Jasmine's podcast on How to Avoid Bankruptcy