Who , what ? <| sep |> I went through almost the same situation , my family wasn ' t well off , I never got told about how to deal with bills , and at the age of 17 I was homeless because I had problems at home and my own mum took her partners side with every argument . Luckily they have finally divorced but after a few months of house jumping and living rough , I moved in with my girlfriend at the time . She promised that she would pay rent as she was on full time wages , and I was jobless , as soon as I got a job I said I would start helping to pay rent . We started a joint account and we both put money in that account to pay rent and bills . That didn ' t work out as I found out she was spending it instead of paying bills . She had been doing this for about 6 months and hiding rent letters so I couldn ' t find out . I found her to be cheating and I told her to leave . I was then made homeless again and left with over 2000 debt . As I am a diabetic the local council allowed me to get a council flat . I ended up getting a nice flat , but jobless again trying to pay off this debt . At the same time I put my self in debt by over 1000 as I didn ' t have a clue about paying bills in time etc . Its now been 3 years since , got a stable job , even better flat , played off most of the debt but still have over 1000 left to pay off . The best thing to do is , make a deal with company ' s you have debt with , they will help you by knocking the price off the debts , this doesn ' t improve your credit rating , but it does help out a lot with high debts . Keep your head up and just tell debt collectors or company ' s your situation and they will help you out