Smash hit

Which just means they will have to find another pot to borrow from: because banks know that the state of the Impoverished Professional is not at all the same as the state of people who are really, desperately and incurably skint.

Jessica admits her financial nadir is the result of a recent skiing holiday. “And it’s the price of me not working,” she says. Jessica, mother of three, is a former accountant and like a true Impoverished Professional, still operates as if she were coining it within the Square Mile. “I have no money but I still had a £190 haircut last week,” she says.

Am I curtailing my lifestyle? Well, I have dramatically curbed my addiction to black cabs, but can’t live without a decent haircut every eight weeks, vaguely designery suits, Stila makeup and The New Yorker. As I say to my bank manager (whose mobile number is naturally on my direct dial), if you want to keep working, you have to keep looking the part.

And the only way to do that is to put everything on the interest-free card and count the days until the period of grace is up. As each interest-free period draws to a close, my husband and I spend a flurried few days furiously washing debt from all the old cards and finding new ones to plonk it onto.

We have to be very careful not to leave the sum even a week over the six-month limit, for fear of monumental amounts of interest repayments. To make our lives even more, well, lively, we recently had another baby, while at the top of the family, our eldest has started seriously campaigning for not only a dog, but riding lessons. “Thank God they’re not at private school,” says my husband, with feeling.

In 2002, in the belief that to make money one needs to actually spend it, I decided to splash out on a fabulously chic flat in Paris. I now avoid answering any incoming call with the prefix 33, because I dread speaking to my French bank manager as my French mortgage is in almost permanent arrears.

I am letting my flat to tourists — it’s just that there are never quite enough of them. And French bank managers are far less lenient than British ones. Indeed, the whole French attitude to debt is far stricter. Compared with our 67m credit cards there are only 2.8m swishing around in France, a country with a similar population.

“Maybe we could have a fire sale,” says my husband gloomily. We look around our lovely house, into which we have just moved after the arrival of baby No 4. There is nothing to sell apart from our buy-to-let flats, and what is the point of buying them as an investment if you are going to sell them five years later? My mother, bless her, has given us the wherewithal to buy a new car. So we put our four-year-old Skoda for sale on the internet and hope we will make a couple of thou. Surprise, surprise, nobody wants it. Anyone who could use a new-ish family-size Skoda is presumably also in hock to small pieces of plastic from John Lewis, Sainsbury’s, Mint and Uncle Tom Cobbleigh. No wonder a consumer credit bill is going through parliament, which will mean stricter controls on lending.

Is there hope? “Well, to get us out of this, one or both of our incomes has to rise dramatically,” says my dear spouse, who works for the BBC, which is about to get going with massive redundancies. So, not much hope from TV Centre, I fear. “Plus, we have to dramatically rein in our spending.”

We start as we mean to go on. High tea with the kids. A night in with Doctor Who instead of a night out at the theatre. Bracing walks on Hampstead Heath. It’s fun, in a Shaker-style, Amish work-ethic sort of way. But habits are hard to break. By Thursday I find myself trundling around Mothercare, picking up clothes for the children, before chugging into Soho to watch a play and crack open a bottle of chablis over dinner.

“Plunge into your savings,” someone says, but who has savings any more? There are people in our family with savings, but they are all under the age of eight. Apparently, the supermodel Caprice Bourret saves £7 out of every £10 that she earns. When I find this out, I feel like staying in bed all day. “Well, she doesn’t have children, does she,” says my husband reassuringly.

At least we don’t run a shop; consumer spending is so down that many commercial enterprises are looking into a black hole that will be assuaged only when the debt-stricken populace gets on top of its finances and starts going shopping again. Which we will, we will.