Andy Banwell in happier times

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A former bus driver has been made bankrupt owing £250,000 after buying four pubs on credit cards.

Andy Banwell, 44, who features in the documentary 'Debt - The Insider' was made bankrupt for the first time seven years ago owing £12,000. He said at the time that if he were going to be made bankrupt again it would have to be for £1 million. This time he managed a quarter of that figure.

In the run-up to the second bankruptcy, Andy took every loan that was offered to him, but his downfall was the money he borrowed to fund his entrepreneurial lifestyle. As a big drinker (he used to down 20 pints and a bottle of vodka a day) he thought he could make a lot of money running pubs.

"I knew nothing about pubs but somebody got me into the idea that it would be good," he says, "and you know everybody that drinks in a pub thinks there's loads of money in this. So I found out you could buy leases fairly cheaply, went along, looked at a pub that was run down, thought yeah I could do this whole thing and borrowed some money - on a credit card."

In fact, he managed to get 17 credit cards, four £25,000 loans and several other loans from doorstep lenders offering money to do the roof, buy a kitchen and get new household equipment, among other things.

He says: "I'd apply for cards and be accepted. Every time I went over my limit they'd just increase it further. Sometimes I'd even call saying I need an extra £10,000 and they'd just say 'OK'. The debt just mounted."

But it was the pubs that bled him dry. He bought a 30-year lease on the Monkton Inn near Taunton, Somerset, for £25,000. He sold at a loss 18 months later having spending £24,000 on it. He also bought the Kellaway Arms, in Bristol, the King's Head in nearby Whitehall, and soon afterwards he got the Bunch of Grapes in Bristol city centre.

Once the Grapes began losing cash, Andy sold the Kellaway to try to keep his head above water but he had to give up after an unexpected £13,000 rent bill on the Grapes. "The idea was always to pay everything off, never buy anything that didn't make money," he says. "The reality is there wasn't the time for all these individual businesses to make the money back to pay off everything that we'd borrowed - the interest was too high."

Andy never thought about the interest rate he was paying on the loans and credit cards when he took them out. In fact, because he used some of the credit cards to borrow cash, he started paying interest from the day he took the money out of the ATM. So very quickly the debts mounted up to an impossible level.

"Borrow enough, make a million, pay it all back - to me interest rates were irrelevant. I was gonna be a millionaire," he says with a rueful smile.

Andy's case is extreme but millions of people have racked-up impossible levels of debt in the last few years thanks to irresponsible lending and our society's desire to splash the cash. Channel 4's documentary looks at the excesses of banks, credit card and loan companies and the misery, and even death, that their lending practices have caused.

As a nation we now owe over £1.3 trillion, including mortgages, credit cards, bank and other loans. For some, like Andy, only bankruptcy (in fact two bankruptcies in his case) brings home the reality of borrowing more than can be paid off. Andy has learnt his lesson - almost. He now has a single card with a £300 limit and plans to take his wife and two kids to Cyprus - to open a restaurant.

Jasmine Birtles is from Money Magpie - the website that gives you a richer life