You may be renting your home privately or from the council or housing association. If money is tight what can you do if you can’t afford to pay your rent? Rather speak to someone? Call 0800 077 6180.

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• Cannot afford the rent? Find out why
• Increase your income or reduce expenses
• Reduce other debt payments to free up cash

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Cannot afford the rent? Find out why!

The average cost of renting a property in England and Wales outside of London is now £793 per month. This has increased 3.9% from last year. These figures according to tenant referencing company Homelet in December 2019.

Whilst home rent is a significant amount of a person’s wages, this is not necessarily the reason why you cannot afford the rent. You need to get to the root of the problem. The easiest way to do this is to simply list all of your monthly living expenses. This will include things like your rent, council tax, utility bills, travel expenses and food.

You should soon be able to see where your biggest expenses are. Sometimes people have very high travel costs, costs related to extended families or perhaps health issues. In many cases it is monthly debt payments that are making other payments unaffordable.

You need to look at the bigger picture when it comes to your budget. You need to prioritise your key living expenses first – your rent is one of these. We can support you with this and help you identify the problem ASAP.

Can you increase your income or reduce living expenses?

If you are struggling with your rent or other bills then there is a shortfall somewhere in your budget. The two ways to conquer that is to either increase your income or reduce your expenses; perhaps even both.

To increase your income you could either take on extra paid work through overtime or evening work. Check out this Benefits Calculator to see whether you qualify for any benefits. Some people earn extra by taking in a lodger or renting out their driveway for parking.

Looking for savings on your regular expenses might also solve the problem. Normally these will be in the areas such as travel, entertainment and clothing. Be realistic though, the changes you make need to be sustainable for it to be a long term fix.

If you have worked on both of these areas and you still have a shortfall, then you need to find a debt solution which we can help you with. If you have no debts then you may need to consider cheaper home rental in perhaps a different location.

Can you reduce other debt payments to free cash to pay the rent?

If you exclude all your monthly payments to your unsecured debts, can you afford your priority expenses such as your rent? Unsecured debts would be your loan payments, credit cards, store cards, pay day loans etc. If the answer is yes, then a debt management solution will almost certainly help.

If your budget reveals that you can afford normal acceptable living costs, but not your debt repayments, then you can apply to reduce your debt payments. There are debt solutions that can write off the debt you can’t afford to pay.

If when you have paid your normal living costs you have some disposable income, then this is what you offer the debt solution each month. That way you stop further borrowing which is getting you into more debt. If you have no disposable income at all there is still a solution.

If you have rent arrears these can very often be included in a debt management solution. You then just need to worry about maintaining your normal monthly rent payments going forward.

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