When the work dries up

On a site or on the tools, work can end with a phone call, or with no call at all. The contract is not renewed. The agency stops ringing. The main contractor finds someone cheaper. There is no meeting, no notice, no letter, and nobody whose job it is to say that this has happened to you.

This page is for when that has happened, or is about to, and the money has stopped with it. It is not general advice about debt. That is here. This is about what it is like when the work itself is what has gone.

An ending with nothing to mark it

A redundancy process at least gives you a date to point at. Self-employed and agency work does not. Work thins, then it is gone, and you cannot tell whether this is a quiet patch or the end of it.

That uncertainty is part of the damage. Because nothing officially happened, it is easy to treat it as something you should have handled, rather than something that was done to you. Work that ends this way is a real loss, and it is allowed to hit you like one.

The one everyone leans on

If you are the one who brings the money in, then the money was never only money. It was how you counted yourself in the house, and with your mates. You were the one who sorted things. The one nobody worried about.

Not being that for a while can feel like having been quietly removed from your own life. You may find you cannot say it out loud at home. You may leave at the usual time and sit in the van, or drive about, so that nothing looks different. That is a lot to carry on top of the actual problem, and it is common.

The particular shape of self-employed dread

Self-employed, it comes from several directions at once:

• Invoices that are out there, owed to you, and not being paid
• A tax bill due on money you earned, and have already spent on living
• Tools, a van, or equipment on finance that keeps coming out whether you work or not
• No sick pay, no notice pay, nothing underneath you at all

Each one alone is a problem. Together they feel like a closed room. And the cruel part is that you can be owed plenty and still have nothing, because being owed money pays no bills.

Why it turns into thoughts of ending it

Look at how you have always dealt with trouble: you work. Longer hours, an extra job, a weekend. That has been your answer to everything, and it has worked.

Now the answer is not available. You cannot work your way out of there being no work. When the only tool you trust is the one you cannot pick up, the sums stop adding up, and your mind starts to say the sums are final.

Some people in this position begin to think that they would be worth more gone than present. That is a known feature of this kind of despair, and it is the despair talking rather than the truth. It is a sign the situation has got too heavy to hold alone. It is not something to act on, and it is worth telling someone about as soon as you notice it.

What changes the sums

The arithmetic looks closed because you are doing it alone, in your head, with the worst case filled in for every gap. It is rarely closed.

Debts are negotiable. Creditors have processes for people who cannot pay. A creditor will usually prefer an agreement to a chase. What makes things worse is silence.

Proper debt advice changes the picture. Free advice exists, and the people giving it deal with this for a living. They will work out what you truly owe, what can wait, what can be spread out, and what you are not required to pay at all. The money-and-debt guide linked above covers how to find it and what to expect.

Early is the whole trick. The same debts are far easier to deal with before the deadline than after it. If a tax bill, a finance payment or a rent date is coming, make the call before it, not after. You are not asking for mercy. You are using the process that exists for exactly this.

Look at the benefits system. Being self-employed does not always rule you out, and many people assume it does. Ask an adviser, and do not rely on what a friend once told you.

Out of work is not the same as no use

You have spent years being valued for what you can do. A gap in work takes away the evidence, and your mind fills the space with a verdict.

But being between jobs is a circumstance, not a character flaw. The skills did not go anywhere. The gap is nearly always shorter than it feels from the inside, and the feeling that it is permanent is one of the things low mood does, not something you have worked out.

Small, doable things

• Tell one person the truth about the money. Not everything. One true sentence.
• Put the letters in one place, unopened if you have to, and take them to an adviser.
• If you do not know how to start that sentence, borrow some words.
• Make a safety plan now, while you are thinking clearly enough to write it.

If you are the person looking on, and someone you know has gone quiet since the work stopped, this page is for you.