DMP Mutual Support Thread (Part 5)

dlb

Morning all.
CAR PASSED ITS MOT!!!!!!!! Thank godness for that another thing i can tick off the list!!!!
I get allowed £675 a month for food!!!! for 6 of us...we spend no way near that so rest goes in emergency fund and sky which is our entertainment as dont go out hardly ever! lol. I on averge spend about £70 a week for all food and toiletries. So a nice lump to go into the emergency fund each month. Its took 3 years of practise to get it this low especially with 3 teenagers and a 6 year old too...cooking from scratch and baking has been my answer to cutting down the costs.

Right off to get something done now MOT out the way
Have a good day all, keep smiling and be proud!
Donna
xxx

kissthedebtgoodbye

Happy days dlb :j

Ive managed to add another month of paying token payments so my DMP with CCCS will start on may 1st now. Gives me just an extra month to build up my emergency fund. So far ive sent token payments onto my creditors as of last friday but as yet not heard anything from them yet, still early days mind.

Feels strange that i havnt paid my loan or CC yet and have this extra money, im going to try and be as tight as possible with it

Daffykjs

Bless hubby!

He wanted to go to sainsburys for his shopping but we don't have one in our town and i've got the car at work! So he's done it online and just phoned to ask what card to use!!

And even with the delivery charge (which is quite a lot isn't it? i was quite shocked tbh) he has only gone 30p over the £20 budget i gave him and has enough food for the rest of his time at home!! No silly buys like normal!!

I'll get him trained yet!

2009timeforchange

Hello Everyone :hello:


We havnt had any letter or calls to date untill today! And We've had 3!

Nationwide OD have accepted our payments and frozen interest :T

Nationwide Loan have yet to hear from CCCS

MBNA CC say were not paying enough and if we dont increase they will set a default and sell to a DCA.

Tesco CC, Abbey CC and Nationwide CC still to repsond.

debrag

2009timeforchange wrote: »

Nationwide OD have accepted our payments and frozen interest :T

on I have an OD with Nationwide but not on my DMP £237 to pay, would love to set up a plan with them

newlywed

Proposed forum changes....

anyone want to join in to ask for us to have a separate DMP board?

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=1534959

DMPDarling

Hi all - I started a DMP with my partner in October last year – I found out about DMP’s through this site (how I wish I had known five years earlier!) and through this site – and this thread - I also found out all the information needed to choose a DMP company, to manage the general day to day running of the DMP, how to deal with creditors, budget correctly and everything else besides. I can’t thank the community here enough – that information has given us the power to change our lives for the better in every way, now we can plan to have a family – there is no way I could have considered having a baby 7 months ago, we are getting married (cheaply!), and I can finally sleep at night without feeling sick, worrying and mentally juggling money at 3am.

Now that we are six months in I thought I would run down the list of our creditors, rough amounts owed and whether they accepted the payments and stopped interest or not in case it is of use to other DMPers and people thinking about it – and the news is good. We have between us around £600 a month to pay our creditors.

The following have Accepted our offered monthly payments, frozen interest and stopped charges:

B&Q Financial Services – 1,000
Barclays Bank Business Loan – 10,000
Barclays personal loan – 12,000
Barclaycards x 2 – 2,000
MBNA – 2,000
HSBC Cards x 2 – 2,000 (eventually!)
Argos Card – 1,000
Cahoot – 3,000


Lloyds credit card – owed around £1,000 accepted payments and reduced the interest but have not yet stopped it. We are still working on them.

Dell are the only creditor not to give us a straight answer – but we have not had any nasty letters for a while so we think they have accepted – owe around 2,000

Barclays Bank Account overdrafts – these total about 1,500 all together – they accept the minimum payment but continue to add charges on one account and interest on both. We are still working on these too in the hope they can stop the charges (which are massive) and the interest (which is bearable).

Having gone through it the best advice I can give someone starting out is:

1.Don’t give up if a creditor rejects your offer first time around – keep writing with exactly the same offer – all ours came round in the end

2.Same goes for interest – don’t give up and keep writing the requests to stop – most of ours have stopped now, but many did not initially

3.Staple your £1 postal orders to your initial letters informing creditors about your DMP, and take a photocopy or digital pic of it stapled to the front – if they cash the PO then they can’t deny that they have received the letter (which they routinely do), this has proved useful to us several times!

4.Get organized and keep a really good paper trail – have a manila folder (20p!) for each creditor and keep a copy of all letters sent and received and statements in it

5.Keep a written log of every meaningful telephone conversation (what happened, date, time and person spoken to) you have with your creditors – and if you feel you are being harassed keep a log of all telephone calls full stop. In our experience their record keeping is terrible – make sure yours is spot on and it makes dealing with them much easier

6.If you have a joint DMP and one of you will be primarily responsible for running it (like me!) get your partner to authorize you to discuss their debts with all their creditors (by writing to them usually) right at the front end – this will save a lot of time and frustration later on

7.Finally – don’t get disheartened when you first start and you get all the nasty letters, fines and phone calls – it takes a while but we have not had a nasty letter or phone call in about 3 months now – total creditor silence = utter bliss!

Thanks again to everyone in this thread – it’s been such a great help to us – we should be debt free in around five years time.

2spicy

Ive just been looking at a little device that, although expensive at almost £100 looks just the ticket for these collection agencys that keep calling.

http://www.truecall.co.uk/

also, an interesting snipped gleaned from their website

It is now a legal requirement for call centres that use predictive dialling equipment to show their caller ID.

suze72

Hi DMPDarling

It's really great for those of us just starting out to hear such positive stuff.

Just wondering, are you with a DMP company or self administering?
Also, it sounds like you kept writing to your creditors as well as just sending payments - if that is the case how often did you write?

massivedebts

Thanks for joining us DMPdarling, and for the fab advice.:T


2spicy - did you see my Q about if you can track postal orders?
Thanks
MD xx