DMP help please!

minisoph

Hi

I have not posted on here much, but visit the site and read the posts often.

I have a couple of questions

My husband and i are 4 months into a DMP which we have done ourselves, by writing to all of out creditors. We took this decision, as when we contacted those companies offering help, they hounded us so much, it scared us off. But, we knew we still had to deal with out debt, so tried it ourselves, it worked, with all but 2 of out creditors, so we are quite happy.

Anyway, my first question is, we have settled into our payment plan, but we can see that these companies do not leave any room for things that could possibly go wrong in life. I.e boiler, appliances !!!!!!ing up, car, HUGE dentist bills etc. It hasnt happened to us yet, but what if it does, how do we go about coping & paying for that sort of thing? How do any of you others on DMP's get round that? Any help and advice would be appreciated.

Secondly, i am due to get a compensation payout for a car accident i had a year ago (£3000) and i want to use this to pay off some creditors. I would like to know, can i offer a creditor a final payment for less than i owe? And if i can, is there a level that i should be looking at and a level where i'm just taking the 'mick'? So if i owed £3000 on a card, could i offer them £1500 for a final payment?

Thank you so much in advance

Sophie x

Leixlip1

Hi minisoph - I'm also doing a self-managed dmp. I built in allowances for things like medical bills/boiler repairs etc into my income/expenditure figures and have always clearly stated this and, to date, none of my creditors have queried these. I took advice from National Debtline on this and clearly state this when writing to creditors and quote my client reference number.
I also save the small amounts of money I manage to accumalate e.g. savings on fuel; housekeeping etc and keep these for emergencies.
I don't have much experience of full & final offers to creditors but I would aim at offering them less that 50% of the outstanding debt to start with try 33% and see what happens.
Hope everything works out for you.

minisoph

Thank you for the reply, i too have used the National Debtline to help me with my DMP, and i am very happy with how i am managing.

The only people i have had problems with are my bank (barclays) who wont help me whatsoever, i have a £10k loan with them and pay £268 a month on that, i've had it for over 2 years and still owe more than i borrowed!
I have another bank account set up, which has no OD and is just for myself to pay bills, and as soon as we get out of this mess, my hubby and i will leave barclays (my hubby has been with them for nearly 30 years) they are useless.

I shall try what you have said and let you know how i get on! Many thanx again xx