Imagine owing £70,000 on credit cards. How do you get into that situation? How do you return to the normal, solvent world again? Last week we invited our readers to submit questions to our panel of debt experts, in the latest in our series of web seminars. We were overwhelmed. Some of the questions were heartbreaking: the couple with £70,000 on credit cards, desperate to own their own home. “I am drowning in debt,” cried the reader who hasn’t summoned the courage to tell her partner about the £16,000 in loans and the maxed-out credit cards.

We talk blithely of the £1 trillion debt mountain, but the questions submitted to our web seminar supplied the stories behind the figure. There was a common theme among the indebted readers looking for help: many of them admitted to living far beyond their means. Cheap credit, a few years of the banks exuberantly throwing money at anyone who asked for it and a changing cultural attitude towards debt have fuelled this growing addiction to keeping finances in the red.

Suman Antcliffe, a specialist adviser for Citizens Advice and one of our web seminar experts, says that she is seeing a big increase in the number of higher-income debtors seeking help.

It’s easy to belittle heavy debtors, to accuse them of financial laziness or an excessively profligate outlook. But the reality is more complicated. Debtors slide into the red and find themselves in a spiral they cannot escape. First you overspend your wage, just a little each month. The credit card debt becomes unmanageable and you borrow to pay it off. But your spending continues apace, leaving you with a big loan and mounting credit card debts. You miss a few repayments, incurring punitive charges. Before long you can’t sleep and every knock at the door may be the bailiffs. A lost job or a family tragedy can accelerate the whole process.

The return to solvency is harder than the descent into debt. To see how our experts responded, go to timesonline.co.uk/borrowing. At the heart of the advice was the simple sentiment that so many of us seem to have forgotten. Don’t spend more than you earn.

Union is fighting a losing battle over bank outsourcing

It has to stop. No more Scottish staff should be employed in banks north of the Border. A Scottish bank manager was jailed this week for fraudulently obtaining £21 million in loans, proving that Scots are incapable of looking after our accounts. Ban them from our banks!

Or so the unions might have said if the bank manager in question had been based in India. This week, while the courts in Scotland were uncovering a five-year history of fraud by a Royal Bank of Scotland manager, an Indian call-centre employee was arrested on suspicion of stealing £233,000 from HSBC’s bank accounts.

Cue a remarkably illogical outburst from Amicus, the largest private sector union. David Fleming, the union’s national officer, called on the banks to rethink their entire outsourcing strategy. He said: “If a world player like HSBC is vulnerable to fraud within its overseas call centres, then every organisation outsourcing work is vulnerable.”

Amicus is conveniently forgetting the truism that all banks and financial organisations are vulnerable to fraud perpetrated by disgruntled staff, wherever they may be. The union’s stance was rightly described as patronising by HSBC. The implication of the union’s position is that the action of one crooked member of staff calls into question an entire country’s fitness to handle our cash.

Amicus, which represents many of the staff who deal with our finances, is concerned about outsourcing to the Indian sub-continent for a host of understandable, and well-rehearsed, reasons. The union representing this dwindling job sector is right to fight for its future. But the odds are stacked against it: why employ unmotivated British teenagers to do a job that an Indian graduate will fight to do for less money? If the Money postbag is anything to go by, banking customers are becoming accustomed to the idea that a person on the end of the phone in Bangalore is just as capable of dealing with their banking needs as a fellow Brit. The union’s attempt to confuse the real issues smacks of desperation.

Don’t let Barclays pull the wool over your eyes

HSBC may have branded Amicus as patronising, but the winner in the condescension stakes goes to Barclays.

The bank is to close the branches of Woolwich, the building society it bought in 2000. Woolwich will remain as a mortgage brand, but all other customers will be transferred to Barclays. As Barclays consistently fails to make the best-buy tables, many of these customers will be worse off. A saver with £25,000 in a Woolwich savings account will lose £220 a year in interest after the switch. About 1,200 jobs will be lost.

But as Woolwich explains on its website: “The same helpful staff will be there to meet you at your new Barclays branch, so you’ll meet the same friendly faces, but with a different name above the door.”

Isn’t that nice? Woolwich has a couple of good mortgage deals, but as a general bank its rates are not much more competitive than those of its parent company. Customers should use the merging of the two brands as the impetus to bid goodbye to those friendly faces and search out some better deals.