car negitive equity help and credit card dept....please help..

mooney78

hi every one, i was wondering if anyone could offer some advice. sorry if its long winded.

ill start from the begining, myself and my wife are after years of struggilng paying bills due to bad debt, as most ppl are these days! have decide to pay of our loans and debt off. we have been offered a life line of a loan from a relative and have begun to get settlement offers from debtors and all is going well, HOWEVER! we have a car which we we bought for £8000, at the time everything was great, we were paying our bills and loans then i lost my job and we stopped paying everything. that was two years ago.
we had the usual threatening letters from debt companies for our other debts which we have so far just ignored, however we never in the two years had any correspondance in realation to the car? even with not making any payments!

i have done a hpi check on the car and it does show outstanding finance and we have moved a couple of times in that time but have always redirected our mail.

we do still want the car as it is our lifeline in reguards to travel to work and picking the kids up ect.. we couldnt cope without it, it would be impossible for my wife to get to and from work in realation to the kids and school as i work away two weeks of the month.
what i was wondering was if we were to contact the finance company and made an offer to settle the balance would they accept a reduced amount and if not where would we stand in reguards to repossession as i have checked the market value of the car and it is now only worth about £4000 which means there is negitive equity in the car.
any advice on this would be great

also my wife has a credit card debt which at the time had a limit of £500 which was, two years ago £475 over time this has gained interest and now rests at about £1400! yes £1000 in interest. we are going to offer a f&f payment, do you think it would be worng to offer them the origional amount and refuse to pay any of the interest accrued! i dont mind paying the debt off but i dont want to pay all that interest.

thankyou for your time.
dave

milliemonster

Hi Dave

regarding your car, if this car is on HP then please contact the finance company to sort this out pronto, my brother did what you have done (ie no paid for a couple of years) then one day the bailiffs knocked on his door and took it unless he could stump up £15k there and then.

I doubt they will accept an offer, unless it covers the amount outstanding, as they will just repossess it, sell it and then come back to you for the outstanding amount.

As you are now in work, why have you not started paying for the car and the credit card again?, of course there will be loads of interest applied if you haven't paid anything towards your debts for the last couple of years!

what you really need to do is post up an SOA and we can have a look at what is going on with your budget and then possibly look at F&F from there

mooney78

thanks for your reply, thats what i thought, guess well just have to bite the bullet and stump up the cash, yes i have a job now but have so many other debt we are just going to pay it all off by way of F&F settlemants and just have the one loan to pay, not bad really as we have £30,000 of debt and have reduced the amounts to around 15,000. hopefully this time next year we will be debt free.
thanks for the advice milliemonster