Threatening Letter From HSBC. Help Needed!

WoodruffsDad

My wife ran into financial problems and some time ago she put her finances in the hands of CCCS. She makes a regular monthly payment to CCCS who pay her creditors.

HSBC are well aware that she is working with CCCS but they have been hounding her on a regular basis. She is continually telling them to contact CCCS and she sends the letters on to them but HSBC are relentless in their harassment!

Today my wife has received a letter from Helen Packwood, Senior Manager Collections at HSBC Salford. Also enclosed is a Statement Of Means form.

The charmless letter from HSBC reads:

"Dear Mrs. xxxxx

We demand immediate payment of £yyy. This is the amount you owe the bank, made up as follows:

Bank account including interest and charges to date: £zzz.

Personal Loan Account including interest and charges to date: £aaa.

We may make further demands or demands for repayment for any other money or liabilities which are now, or may become, owing to the bank.

As a defaulting debtor, details of your default including your name and address may be given to the Credit Reference Agencies named below [Experian, Equifax and Callcredit] if we have not received a satisfactory response from you within 28 days.

Credit Reference Agencies supply information to lenders in order to establish people's credit histories quickly and simply. Lenders then use this information to help decide whether or not to accept applications for credit from customers. If details of your default are given to Credit Reference Agencies, this may make it difficult for you to obtain credit elsewhere in future."

My wife is worried sick about this because she is making regular payments to CCCS and she thought that things were going O.K.

What should she do?

RAS

If your wife pays less than the minimum payment, the bank are entitled to place a default on her account. This is just advanced warning that they are considering it.

WoodruffsDad

RAS wrote: »

If your wife pays less than the minimum payment, the bank are entitled to place a default on her account. This is just advanced warning that they are considering it.

But what should she do? Fill in the Statement of Means? Hand it all over to CCCS? She is very worried as she has not missed a payment to CCCS. This is pure bullying.

RAS

Hi

It is standard practice for banks to demand the the whole sum. The fact that your wife has broken her original agreement with them will almost always premit them to do this.

She may well get a temination lette rand then a default letter.

Send the Statement of means to CCCS and they will reply. Most banks prefer tit that way.

looby75

give the cccs a ring, they will send out another SOA to HSBC, file the letter away somewhere and don't worry about it too much, it's a pretty standard letter when you are on a DMP.

I get them from egg and Halifax quite regularly but they have never taken it any further. If they do all that is likely to happen is that your account is passed onto a debt collection agency, who will ask to see your SOA. If this happens, again just contact CCCS to tell them your debt has been passed on, and they will make all the necessary changes you payment allocation

Margin_Walker

I would definately think about what you want to do rather than file it. That looks a lot like the final demand letters that the bank sends before the debt is passed on to HSBC's internal DCA(Metropolitan).

If you are receiving this it means that there is not a repayment agreement in place witht the bank usually. They would only usually accept a dmp from cccs on condition that the the outstanding debt is converted into a Managed Loan. Does your wife have one of these in place? Have cccs showed her any correspondence confirming that the dmp had been accepted by HSBC?

If the account is passed to Metropolitan all interest will be frozen but I think a default marker will usually be registered.

RAS

Hi

Please do not agree to a managed loan, as they add ALL the interest due up front.

Nargleblast

I second what RAS says. I and other people on this forum have had pressure applied from HSBC to agree to a Managed Loan, but CCCS will advise you in the strongest terms not to agree to it as once you have signed up HSBC could and probably would lump on any charges or interest they like, and even if they tell you it's a zero percent loan they could move the goalposts any time. In fact, told me the best thing that could happen is that the debt gets passed on to Metropolitan because then things tend to settle down and you carry on making the payments under the DMP until the debt is eventually cleared. Your wife will probably get loads of telephone calls from an overseas call centre, and the calls will happen daily, sometimes twice daily, so brace yourselves. There is good advice on here if that should happen so keep us posted and chin up - at least you are facing up to things and not trying to do a runner.

Margin_Walker

I appreciate there is a lot of suspicion related to managed loans and thats fine. I think they serve a purpose and I would take one if I was in difficulty but I work for them so i'm obviously not the most impartial person to take advice from.

I guess the basic principal would be to try and reduce the amount of interest you are paying on any outstanding debt. Not sure what kind of debt the OP's wife has but assume it's overdraft, personal loan or credit card or any combination of the three.

The first option is going down the managed loan route(assuming thats affordable in the first place) and paying interest at 7% above boe and keeping any default from a credit file.If thats not the main concern then it would probably be better to let it go to metropolitan where you would be paying no interest at all and may have scope for accepting lower payments.

The point i'm trying to make is thats both these options almost certainly involve much lower rates of interest than she is currently paying. The one thing i wouldn't want to be doing is making payments that the bank hadn't accepted and being charged the interest associated witht the previous products. If she really doesn't want to consider a managed loan it may be worth stopping any payments and asking them to send the debt to metropolitan as early as possible.

RAS

Well the managed loan I know best had all the interest rolled up into it, for the principal and the outstanding OD and the PPI, as well as the cost of the single premium PPI.

Which means that 60 percent of the value is PPI, charges and Interest.

Margin_Walker

RAS wrote: »

Hi

Please do not agree to a managed loan, as they add ALL the interest due up front.

Not really sure what you mean by this. Surely would better describe a personal loan. A managed loan acts more like a mini mortgage