There has been an increasing number of cases coming to our attention of people needing a remedy for a serious fever - the debt fever!

Just for a moment, think of the lovely city of Exeter - gateway to Devon and Cornwall, lovely architecture, buzzing arts scene and a lively after dark social scene. It has a population of about 100,000 people. This year, that same number of people will go personally broke. Thats a lot of people!

The helpful folk at the Citizens Advice Bureau (CAB) have reported that they have advised on 1.4 million debt cases in 2005-06 and there has been a jump of 55% in the number of people becoming insolvent in the UK. The numbers of people seeking individual voluntary arrangements (an alternative to bankruptcy) has risen by over 100% on the same quarter last year. Clearly this is proving to be a major outbreak after all....

Credit continues to be the largest ailment for many of you including credit cards, store cards, unsecured personal loans, mail order debts and overdrafts. Over 824,000 of you have sought advice and treatment for these problems, a figure that has doubled over the past eight years.

As this is clearly affecting many of you, what can you do to stop the debt fever becoming too severe?

The best treatment we recommend is to talk to some lovely people who can give impartial and useful advice on debt.

We tend to refer people to: The Citizens Advice Bureau and also the National Debt Helpline.