Struggling with debt? Ask a debt advisor a question

junpit · 25 February 2013 at 12:56PM

Hi

In Feb 2012, I left virgin media owing them £12. The queried the amount and told them it was wrong. It went unpaid for a few months and they registered it as a default.

In June, I received a letter with an 0800 number and I rang it and got someone from a debt resolution department at VM. These were the people who registered the defaults. Stupidly I do not have this letter anymore.

Anyway they agreed there was a mistake and I paid them £6 which was the correct amount. The item was removed as a default from experian. I know this as experian told me (as I have credit expert).

In Jan 2013, they re-regsitered the original £12 amount as a default. Experian are refusing to remove it as they say that VM have to do it. I rang Virgin about this and the guy confirmed over the phone that my old accouont is paid and they are unable to escalate this to anyone.

I really need this original 0800 number, but I can't find it anywhere. Can anyone help?

Thanks

Darren

StepChange_James · 25 February 2013 at 4:30PM

Lilypuppy wrote: »

:(Hi there,

This is all new to me, so I do hope I am getting it right. I am writing to request help or advice and support. My husband and I both work, with ok jobs ( I am a part time primary teacher and he works for DWP), so our joint salary is £53,000 pa. We have 3 adult daughters, all living at home. The two who are working pay rent of £200 per month each. We have always supported the girls, paid for driving lessons, tests, insurance, first cars etc.

But we are in a mess. We have a mortgage of £160,500 and unsecured credit card debt of £28,000. We run a couple of old cars (needed for work which is 20 miles away), have Sky tv, but little else in terms of luxury. Our house is worth £220,000. We have a debt mountain and I don't know what to do for the best. At the moment everything is up to date, but any day now I will no longer be able to service the debts. This is because all credit is maxed and we are struggling to get more (fair enough!). I can't work full time as I have a degenerative muscle disease and even working 3 days is a challenge. I can't get DLA due to being able to walk ok.

I think I need to ask what we should do with regard to either shifting debt to a personal loan or a secured loan or a debt management plan. However, we need to be careful, as we have had the house up for sale for a year, in the hope we can move nearer to work and release equity for debts. Problem is, that no sale means no equity and we are going under, if not this month, then next.

Please can someone advise us? And before anyone says it, yes, we have been beyond stupid, but light bulb moment has arrived, so please be kind! Thanks for reading, Lilypuppy

I have now used the Step Change tool, which suggests either we downsize and use the equity to clear debts, or we take out a DMP. Both sound great, but what worries me is if we sell the house we will need a mortgage, which we will struggle to get on a DMP. Please can you still offer me advice? Thank you so much, Lily:)

Hi Lily,
I’d advise against taking out any new credit at the moment. Taking out another loan is could actually make the problem worse. Taking a secured loan is often not a great idea in this sort of situation.

Currently your credit debt is a non-priority meaning they it should only be paid the money you have left in your budget once you’ve paid your priorities (mortgage, council tax, gas, food and all other livings costs) - if you were to take a secured loan you are effectively turning a non-priority debt into a priority – if you were unable to pay this your home would be at risk.

If you were to go on a DMP – the money you had left at the end of the month once all priority living costs have been paid would be divided up between your creditors. You would only be paying an amount you can afford until your debts are cleared. This would affect your credit rating as you are not making full payments – this may affect your ability to get a mortgage in the future however credit ratings can be improved, there is no such thing as black-listing. If your situation was to improve and you could resume full monthly payments your rating would improve over time.

If you have your reference number from our Debt Remedy tool you could call our web support team on the number in your advice booklet – if you give them your web reference number they can pull up your budget and talk through your options with you.

Hope this helps,

Thanks,

James

StepChange_James · 25 February 2013 at 4:34PM

junpit wrote: »

Hi

In Feb 2012, I left virgin media owing them £12. The queried the amount and told them it was wrong. It went unpaid for a few months and they registered it as a default.

In June, I received a letter with an 0800 number and I rang it and got someone from a debt resolution department at VM. These were the people who registered the defaults. Stupidly I do not have this letter anymore.

Anyway they agreed there was a mistake and I paid them £6 which was the correct amount. The item was removed as a default from experian. I know this as experian told me (as I have credit expert).

In Jan 2013, they re-regsitered the original £12 amount as a default. Experian are refusing to remove it as they say that VM have to do it. I rang Virgin about this and the guy confirmed over the phone that my old accouont is paid and they are unable to escalate this to anyone.

I really need this original 0800 number, but I can't find it anywhere. Can anyone help?

Thanks

Darren

Hi Darren,

How strange. It's almost like the debt came back from the dead to put a mark on your credit file.

I'm afraid I don't have any contact numbers for Virgin but if you search this website you might find it: http://www.saynoto0870.com/search.php. I've had a look under Virgin Media and there are quite a few 0800 numbers listed, perhaps one will ring a bell.

The alternative would be to submit a written complaint to Virgin Media and let them get to the bottom of it from their end of things.

Hope this helps.

James

StepChange_James · 25 February 2013 at 6:39PM

Hi everyone,

We're going to be out of the office tomorrow, so won't be on here to reply to your questions. Feel free to post anyway and we'll get back to you on Wednesday.

If you've got a query that needs answering more urgently then please give us a call on our helpline: http://www.stepchange.org/Contactus.aspx.

Cheers

James

Lilypuppy · 25 February 2013 at 7:47PM

Hi James,

Thank you very much for your reply and particularly how much sense it makes :T ! I totally understand about not turning this into secured debt via a secured loan, which is great advice.

As I am only just home from work I will call later in the week for further advice, as the DMP structure leaves a few issues I will need to clear, not least the fact we are both due a further drop in salary in April in order to pay the increasing demands of our 'gold-plated non- contributory' pensions. Mine rose last year from £90 to £120 per month and from April it goes from £120 to about £170. This means I now have a further question, which is should I freeze my pension as it is too expensive? So many decisions, yet I know we are luckier than many, though it is hard to be up-beat just now.

I am really grateful for your advice and we are working on reducing food bills and other non-essential spending. It is baby steps and feels like a mountain, but at least we are trying!

Many thanks,

Lily

Spammy1983 · 26 February 2013 at 12:00AM

Hi everyone, I'm just gonna throw this out there and see what I get back. I've never been very good with organising money. Ok so what I owe out is as follows:
1. Overdraft £1000 (will be cleared next week so I suppose can discount this).
2. Barclaycard £500
3. MasterCard £2200
4. Unsecured loan of £15,000 (2yrs left to run)

Barclaycard is 0% but I'm out of 0% on MasterCard.

I'm earning around £3000 per month after tax.

What's best plan of action?

Thanks in advance.

onyablue · 26 February 2013 at 10:05AM

hi i have two payday loans due out of my account on the 28th i will not have enough money to cover them ,i have a new account and was going to cancel the payments on the loans and email them can they be included in a dmp

nicola302 · 27 February 2013 at 11:57AM

Please can you help, My partner got into debt and he took out an IVA we are just going through the process of our last payments but are now being stumped with Large nominee and supervisor fees of about £7½k, on top of that they are requesting that we remortgage our house, (please note it is my partners IVA and we are joint owners of the house) and give them 85% of my partners share which at present works out to about £30k, even though from the outset i had stipulated that the house was not to be touched a that we would prefere to make a years worth of additional payments.
so the long and the short of my story is this sum...
£65k - original debt
£15K - paid monthly contributions (over 6 years)
£7½k - Fees
£30k - Remortgage.

what i would like to know is, can we replace the equity release with monthly payments due to Me being made redundant in a few months, and do the IVA companies take this into consideration?
it is putting a lot of stress on the family as we thought we would only have to pay an extra years payments and the fees, also we were hoping to move next year to a bigger property as my 3 children are now too big to share 1 double bedroom.

nicola302 · 27 February 2013 at 12:02PM

Phone up all your creditors if you are in financial hardship and arrange a payment plan, i personally have about £40k worth of debt but due to other half entering into an IVA there was nothing i could do with my debt so have been paying of minimal amounts, like £3.50 a month on some... unfortunately i am also being made redundant so thats going to make things worse... but looking at your income of £3000 per month, you should easily be able to cut down on everything for a year or two and pay these off.

Anondebtadvisor · 27 February 2013 at 12:02PM

You will only be rquired to release 85% loan to value and you will not be able to obtain a remortgage, you should have to provide your IVA compnay with 2 remortgage declines and they will extend the IVA by 12 months in leiu of that equity.

It is written in the proposal that you can be pay an additional 12 months if you cannot release the equity, which will be the case in the current market - so dont worry x

Struggling with debt? Ask a debt advisor a question

Comments

Categories

Get our FREE Weekly email full of deals & guides - and it’s spam-free