I hate wallowing in self pity but I seem to have been doing a lot of it lately. No doubt like many people, money is really tight at the moment and the futures pretty scary. The bills come in quicker than I can pay them and my bank account feels like it’s haemorrhaging my hard earned cash.

There are a great deal of things I love about being self employed, working the hours I choose, only having myself to answer to and of course not being stuck in an office from dawn to dusk make a welcome change after 20 years of office work.

However, the financial insecurities that come with being self employed can weigh very heavily. Despite having a clear cancellation policy for pupils failing to show for their lessons, it can be very hard to enforce this at times and if I do, I often end up cutting off my nose to spite my face. I know the maximum hours I can safely work and I have calculated the minimum hours I have to work to make enough to pay my bills and I cut my coat according to my cloth if I have anything in between that. I usually overbook, working on the basis that I’ll get a certain percentage of cancellations but the minute I fall below the minimum hours I need, I immediately run at a loss with no way to recoup the money. This can lead to very stressful times and I’m sure many self employed workers have faced similar worries. Despite what the adverts say, driving instructors seldom get anywhere close to ‘earning £30000’.

Sadly, following my redundancy I accumulated a lot of debt simply trying to make ends meet and keep my home. Also with my impeccably good sense of timing, I got myself tied into a high rate fixed interest mortgage just before the market collapsed and interest rates plummeted. So, as many people mortgages tumbled, mine stayed high and indeed increased, being a stepped mortgage.

I would like to think I’m a fairly switched on person, and I don’t stick my head in the sand. I have addressed my money worries from every angle possible including requesting a payment holiday from my mortgage for a couple of months to allow me to save a little to downsizing to a one bedroom house. However, the former, I have been advised by my lender would be classed as mortgage arrears, something I am unwilling to have after 20 years of never missing a mortgage payment and the latter option, after putting down a deposit, would see me in a house the size of a shoebox, with the same size mortgage, and no savings, so in a nutshell, no better off. Needless to say, and no doubt like so many other people, I feel pretty trapped at the moment.

I don’t have much choice but to ride the storm for the next 18 months when my mortgage rate should come down, my credit card debt will have been reduced and hopefully, although I’m not holding my breath on this one, the cost of fuel will have come down, something on which I spend a fortune on a monthly basis.

It is no wonder people buckle under financial pressure and the worry it brings. I have never in my working life been so fraught about how I am going to generate enough income to pay my never ending monthly expenses. I absolutely loathe the fact that this worry seems to dominate ever waking moment and certainly a good few sleepless nights too! I hate that money or the lack of it is dictating what I can and can’t do, forcing me to turn down wedding and birthday invitations because I can’t find the money for a gift, never mind a new outfit. I feel mean and stingy and hate the thought that people will judge me on the currently financially crippled me rather than the generous person I have always been and loved being, up until this point.

I hate the fact that I wear the same clothes day in and day out because, to buy anything new, I would have to run up a store card – more debt. I hate the fact that I have two pairs of ‘work’ shoes, one that I can only wear on dry days because it has a great big hole in the sole and the other that is so run down at the heal that there is a stone chip from my driveway stuck in it! And worse than anything, I had Holly at the vet for her monthly checkup yesterday. The vet has recommended that she has some sessions in their new hydrotherapy pool to help her joints. I utterly loathe that anyone would ever accuse me of not doing everything I can to help Holly regain her health but at £20 per 15 minute session three times a week, I’ve got some pretty difficult decisions to make here.

Like I said, I hate wallowing in self pity and believe in or not, I do try hard to focus on the positives. At least I have clean drinking water and a warm bed at night which is more than a lot of people have. But I hate even more being in this rotten position at the moment, with what feels like, no way out.

Friday is September the 11th – the 8th anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Centres in New York. The impact of watching these events unfold in front of me on the TV in my living room, will stay with me forever. The horror of helplessly watching as people fought for their lives and the trauma they and their loved ones must have endured that morning, will never leave me.

I watched one of the tribute programs shown on TV this week depicting the events of 9/11. It was a documentary with a lot of previously unseen footage. There was one shot, which showed the harrowing last minutes of one of the victims in the tower. He was hanging on to the outside of the building hundreds of stories up, half in and half out of the window with the flames and smoke raging behind him. It was devastating to watch.

There is no doubt, these are difficult times right now for many of us. There is seldom a minute in a day that I am not worrying about things. I am permanently exhausted, permanently stressed. I can’t afford to take a day off work, never mind go away on holiday and this is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future and goodness knows how I will deal with Christmas. I have so many dreams and so many goals I want to achieve and I can’t do any of them because of lack of money. I feel like I am barely keeping my head above water. I am stagnating. I am living to work and I want to be working to live.

However, I must keep things in perspective. Until I am faced with the choice of jumping 100 floors to my death or being burned alive after simply turning up for a days work at the office, I really have nothing to complain about.

A depressing post I know, but perhaps, appropriately for this time, a reflective one for those who feel life is getting on top of them.