Have you found yourself out of work? Struggling mentally? Financial issues in every direction? Stress mounting inhibiting you completing simple tasks?

This is something I have gone through. It would seem the reality of my experience is after 10 months of being signed off work sick I was still sorting out paper work to try to recieve help in all these directions!
This just built more stress and more worry and uncertainty. From my own experience it seems people are not informed of steps and procedures put in place to support you. Your only ever told half the story by each governing body due to staff not knowing in their personal journey of their career.
Here are some things you should look into. From day one of losing your job or being signed off sick to give you the best chance mentally and financially to recover as quickly as possible.

• Apply to gas trust to get help with energy bills.
• Apply to council tax for a support discount.
• Apply for a government "Breathing space order" giving you 2 months where your creditors are not aloud to contact you or add interest to your accounts.
• ECS
• Universal credit
• Pip
• Housing benefits 
• Home owner? After 3 months of UC you can apply for interest on your mortgage to be paid.
• Debt solution companies "Step change" advise you on creating budgeting sheets to submit to your creditors and setup payment plans you can afford in short term stopping interest.
• Reduced water tariff from your supplier
• Apply for 0% balance transfer credit cards to transfer debt to save heavy interest each month
• Food banks and local churches to help you save valuable pennies.

If you actioned all of this in your first week of hitting bad times it would help you massively moving forwards financially and mentally! Instead I found all this out slowly over 10 months and stressed more and more over that 10 months. Taking 10 months to finally find the place I needed to be in, to be able to heal mentally with no stress and focus on recovering. No one is held responsible for this waste of time!

"No one's coming to help you! You have to help yourself!"

Good luck people hope this helps! Bad times don't last for ever, it will pass. Please feel free to message us any services we haven't mentioned so we can update this section to help others.

Additional advice.

When we are stressed sick and have money worries we can become unmotivated and struggle to action things due to tasks taking a lot of effort. Here are some pointers to help you from day one.

• Keep all medical notes including sick notes in a pdf on your phones file folder. You will continually need to send them off as evidence. 
  
  
• Have a photo iD on your phone saved in same folder.
• Signup to mobile banking and download your statements and keep in same folder.
• Any benifits you are on Download the statements pdf from there website and keep in same folder.

May sound obvious but we have found with depression and anxiety PTSD and many other conditions. We get confused and open things and then find it difficult to find weeks months later. So we then give up on tasks and we are not "Goal Focusin". This I turn can add to our frustrations and this feeds back into our negative thought patterns. Inhibiting is healing. These simple suggestion help build a solid foundation to apply for all that's needed to help you ASAP.

You will be asked to do a "Budget plan" to give to your creditors as part of the process. Please find an example of one below. Be honest and list everything! This will help you.

• Get breathing space with your creditors.
• Help you see areas you may be able to save valuable money on now your in a different situation you need to think differently.
• Action ASAP your creditors don't know your situation! They will add interest monthly if you don't contact them! Action action action "Goal Focusin"
• Set your self timed sessions to action your goals and make notes to refer back to.