Jaks road to Bankruptcy

Jaks

Just been looking through the bankruptcy forms. I have a few questions.

1. How do I work out my income? My husband and I get income support for our family as he is disabled and gets dla. The income support is in his name and includes money for him, me, our 4 children and he also gets severe disabilty allowance inluded in our income support amount. I get £5 child maintinance from my ex-husband included in our income support. The only benefits in my name are child benefit and housing benefit& council tax benefit. We have no other income.

2. The reason why we are going bankrupt.
We started by having a small credit card each from capital one for £200 each several years ago. We then got offered bank loans form our bank Lloyds tsb.Things were going ok, payments up to date with no problems. I stupidly took on 2 other credit cards (Lloyds tsb & Littlewoods (LPF)).We were still doing ok with our payments and were up to date.

For some reason that I can't remember we ended up with provident loans, things were still going ok until we got a letter from our landlord out of the blue saying that he was very sorry but he had to put our house on the market as he could no longer continue with his business due to ill health. We had lived in the house for 11 years.

We had to quickly find another suitable house in the area due to schools and I needed to be near my parents as my mum is disabled (in a wheelchair) and they sometimes need some help. I had to take on a new provident loan (the old one was paid up) to help with rent in advance, deposit and moving costs as well as rubbish clearance costs (we had a lot of old broken furniture that needed replacing - another expense).

We were still managing to somehow pay our debts until the housing benefits office sent the cheque to our old property (they managed to send the first cheque to our new address and some how messed up the second cheque). That tipped our finances over the edge and I contacted our creditors explaning that we had lost our home and had to move and managed to secure reduced payments. This was going ok until my electric bill trebbled and food prices started rising (early 2008) and things were going wrong and we could no longer afford to pay all the creditors.

I lost my nanny in May this year who I was very close to - I used to see her nearly every day, that messed me up a bit and I could not concentrate on my finances.

Stupidly I kept up the normal payments on greenwoods and provident as I didn't think I had a choice as they were doorstep collectors. Things came to a head in July when we got a court letter about one of our debts threatening bailiff visits (from our local court), this prompted me to go have a good look at our finances and see things were such a mess, I went to the CAB who advised bankruptcy.

So I am saying that the reason for our bankruptcy was losing our home,over commiting on credit to keep us afloat.

Will the OR have a problem with this?

We haven't gambled all our money away or drank all our money away or got lots of goods to show for our debts, we even didn't go on expensive holidays - we have 1 a year in England (We got to Butlins with the kids).

When gambling is mentioned do you have to declare if you have ever brought a lottery ticket or had a flutter on the grand national or visited the arcades on holiday?

Thanks reading my long essay.

Jaks

Jaks

Just thought of another question.

I have read posts mentioning that you need to take 3 SOA's with you when you go bankrupt. Where do you get the SOA forms from? We didn't appear to get any with our bankruptcy papers.

Jaks

Jaks

bump incase anyone knows the answers to my questions.

dalip

Morn

You can download them from here

www.insolvency.gov.uk or even fill them in on-line. If you do themon-line make sure you save data at regular intervals. You can go back and alter anything at any time. Then just print them off whem you have them finished.D

Jaks

Thanks. Is there any guidelines to the the amounts you put down for things. We are a family of 6 (2 adults and 4 children aged 1,4,13 & 16)

Jaks

dalip

Yes somewhere but with prices rising,it's prob out of date:rolleyes: , i would just put what you spend now. Then post it here and we can look at it for you and tell you what we think the OR will/won't allow.

You are allowed things like dent/opti/perscript/house in/haircuts/pet ins/hol fund/dry cleaning/clothes ect ect.If you get stuck just ask away.D

080808

Hi Jaks,
you may have one already but if not you can get a budgeting loan from the dss which might be enough to pay your br fees. i think the new rule is that this will be written off when you are discharged from bankrupcy but there may be some other views here on that. also the cab can help you apply for the br fee through water/gas/elec company charitable funds that do pay out for this sort of thing - not everyone gets it though - i didn't.
i'm sure it will all work out fine, really, best of luck.

Jaks

Thanks for the advice, our CAB money advisor suggest that we stop paying our creditors and use this money to save towards the bankruptcy fees. Our money advisor wrote to all our creditors and offered reduced payment, but she said by the time they all go through and they reply we would be filling for bankruptcy. She was right - we went down the CAB on Monday 11th August for the above appointmant and was advised to contact the courts to get our bankruptcy forms sent out (we live 30 miles away from the bankruptcy court) and make an appointment for a date to go bankrupt (we hade to make sure we would be able to save the fees by then). We got our appointment for 4th Semptember at 10-30am (less than 1 month away).

Jaks

Jaks

Things are quiet at the moment, no calls (still time today though) or letters from the creditors today.

I started to fill in my SOA online today and it looked really daunting to start off with, but before I knew where I was I had completed 70% of the form. I have got to complete the outgoings section, the creditors section and banks & credit cards section.

I wouldn't have got as far as I have with the forms today with out the help from the wonderful people on here - thanks guys . We are still waiting to here from the CAB with an appointment to help us fill our forms (might not need it now - but at least they can check it and see if there is anything I haven't done right or missed.

Why is this site so addictive - I have spent so much time on here reading and posting (mostly reading)since we made the decision to go bankrupt.

Jaks

Jaks

Things have been quiet today on the creditor front. The only creditor we had to deal with today was provident as today was the day we were due to pay them.

I told our provident agent that we were no longer going to be making payments as our finances have been taken over by the CAB and they were dealing with our creditors on our behalf. Our provident agent questioned why we had taken these steps as we seemed to been managing ok (our provident payments were always up to date), we just said that we had a letter from our local court threatening bailiffs if we didn't pay them (this letter came from out of the blue from a company called Asset Link Capital - we had never had any letters from them before this - from the amount they were chasing us for I guess it was from a capital one credit card debt), our provident agent kept asking us lots of questions about our situation but we didn't say anything about going bankrupt, we just said that CAB were offering them a payment plan. Or agent said that they had heard anything yet and we probably would get a letter saying we were in arrears.

I was glad when she left, she gave us the impression that she wasn't too pleased that we weren't paying her direct after all (wether she was concerned about us as she had been our agent for around 5 years or she was worried about her commission I don't know). The visit left me feeling a bit shakey - this has been the hardest bit of the journey so far.

We recieved our paper work from the CAB today detailing our interview and they are even going to go as far as writing back to our creditors, (once they reply with answers to the CAB's payment plan) and advise them of our intention to file bankruptcy. They have been fantastic and helped us a great deal, we cannot thank them enough.

Since making the decision to go bankrupt we have noticed some changes. Today for the first time in ages we were able to take the children out for a walk and treat them to an ice-cream (cost £2.25 between the 4 of them) throught the summer holidays so far we've had to say no to the ice-creams. Its little things like that that make this situation worth going through. It has also been nice to increase the housekeeping budget. We have been struggling on £40 a week (we couldn't afford any more due to creditor payments), we have increased it to £50 (the extra £10 makes a lot of differnce)until after are bankruptcy hearing (we are currently saving for the fees)