DMP Mutual Support Thread (Part 5)

jenevieve

Have just cut up my credit cards! Not that I would be able to use them anyway :rotfl: but it felt cathartic.......
Have also listed about 20 books on Amazon and have already sold 2. It's only a few pounds but it's a start.......Think I need to shore up a decent emergency fund as I think budgeting is going to be a hard lesson for me!

My housemate has just text me to tell me she has just won £80 at Bingo!!!! Think I need to have a go myself maybe............

Toffee_Penny

Morning!

I posted on here a month or so ago about OH Halifax credit card starting to charge interest at a reduced rate meaning we may aswell have been throwing our DMP payment down the drain for all the good it was doing to that particular debt.:mad:

We have also had trouble from Moorcroft who Halifax have contacted to try and get us to pay more. Moorcroft, if you research, are complete nobs when it comes to playing by the rules. They even wrote to OH mum's demanding payment from us. We continued to ignore their letters as we had not had any confirmation about changing over from Halifax.

I even called CCCS and asked if we could take them off our DMP, we got really annoyed at Halifax for doing this. I know they are within their rights as creditors to do this with interest on a DMP but it got to the stage where we were beginning to think 'sod it' and do our own DMP, stop paying the ones who were messing us around and go through the ccj route. We just didn't care.

Anyway we sent a £1 CCA request to Halifax and they replied yesterday with sod all in my opinion. An application upgrade signed by OH in 2003, not the original CCA when the account opened. BUT in the letter they did say that no further interest would be added. :T

I'll be totally honest with you all, we could if we wanted pull out of the DMP and stop paying most of our creditors due to the fact they haven't go the right agreements needed however something inside is pulling us to pay back every penny. We were never looking for an easy way out, otherwise we would have considered bankruptcy. All we ever wanted from the start of setting up our DMP was the creditors to play fair, show a bit of sympathy and understanding and let us pay what we could afford.

I'm just glad Halifax have stopped the interest and charges and we can concentrate on paying back what we spent, nothing more and nothing less. However now I know they haven't got any proper information, really they should not have informed Moorcroft, against Data Protection and all that. If we wanted to be arsey we could but trying to argue with the creditors takes it toll and I'm not sure if I can be bothered really

Maybe if it gets passed on we'd have a better chance of full and final as most DCA's buy for alot less than what the debt is. We'll have to see how it goes :rolleyes:

suze72

Morning all

I completely sympathise with your situation with Halifax Toffee Penny. We have only just started our DMP this month and so far HSBC show no sign of stopping charges or interest - out of interest, how long have you been on DMP for? I'm not sure how long to leave it before asking CCCS to contact them again to try and ask for them to stop the charges etc.

I,m also thinking about reclaiming charges which would quite significantly reduce our debt with HSBC if we got it all back. Only thing is i'm not sure whether it would be better to wait and see if they eventually stop charges and interest first, otherwise the debt will only begin to rise again!
Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

Have a good Sunday:D
Sue.xx

jenevieve

Hi Suze,
I'm a newbie like yourself but I think if you have only been doing the DMP for a month then it might be worth hanging on a bit. It seems that it can take 3 or 4 months by the sounds of it for the regular DMP payments to reassure your creditors that you are serious about things and then hopefully they start playing ball.
I suppose there is always the chance they will continue to add interest and charges but if the majority come on board, it is still a better position than before.
I'm just in the process of sending off my first letters and token payments so I will be in your position in about a month so will be interested to see how you get on.

Hope that helps x

salstar_2

Hi, hope someone can help me out, i'm on DMP with cccs, have been since nov 08, but last month had to reduce payments because had to fix the car, looks like I am going to have to reduce payment again, as need new car parts again, battery packed in now!!!! Do you think this will be ok with creditors? I wrote to them last month explaining the situation as advised by cccs, only had one reply so far from LLoyds who have sent me an expenditure form ( they must have one already from cccs!) What will happen if i reduce payments again? will they sell my debts on this time or what!!! can anyone give me advise please!

2009timeforchange

We have had out CCCS welcome pack through - woohoo!

All seems fine and I think they have been very generous with our outgoings so i dont think its going to be too hard to budget. They have allowed us £73 a week for foos when usually we can do it on £50 so im hoping to save a bit there.

No word from any creditors yet althoough they have all cashed out £1 token payments for February.

We make our first DMP payment this month.

Quillion

Which company is the better then payplan or cccs or are they both as good as each other.

geoffmr1

Hi Suze72,

My DMP has been running for over 15 months now & HSBC still continue to add interest. I'm pretty sure they will drop the charges (they have with us).

To be honest it depends how much you owe them & how much they are being paid through the DMP, if they think it's enough they will stop both. In my case they are were owed £450 from an overdraft, they are being paid £5 monthly through the CCCS but the debt is continually going up & stands at over £525 now. It may seem silly to most but if they was paid £7.50 a month they would stop the interest charges, however CCCS won't increase the payment to them & if I want to increase it I have to pay CCCS enough to increase every other creditor's amount.

They are the only ones out of 9 creditors who continue to add to the debt. I keep asking them to sell it on or pass it over to their in house debt collection team but they won't do it.

suze72

Thanks Jenevieve and geoffmr1.

I guess I shall just hold on for a while and see how things go. Geoff HSBC are our main creditors, we owe them approx £14,000 and are only paying them about £115 per month so it would take 10 years to clear if they stopped adding interest and charges. They offered us a managed loan which with the interest would have increased our debt to them by another 5kish!
And the monthly payments would have been way too much for us to manage.

Do you think it would be worth claiming back unfair charges now or waiting a while?

geoffmr1

Hi Suze72,

I don't know if yours is a loan or a credit card but I'd go for the unfair charges immediately. Of course even if they agree to it they'll only credit it to the account which will reduce your debt somewhat, you won't actually see that money, the same thing happened to me with HFC.

Anything that reduces your debt can only be good & I found with HSBC that once you challenge them they do drop the charges so its worth it from that point of view if nothing else. My partner got £3500 off them from unfair fees.