Fifty Grand in Debt/ What to do?

plummer_in_van

Me and my wife have come to our sences and realised we need HELP.

We have around £50,000 in debt, £3'000 overdrafts in joint names and the rest owed to credit card companys in our own individual names( 4 cards each).
Loan secred on house for£21,000.

We are not behind with any payments up to now but we are just living off credit cardsand finding things extremley hard.

We own our own house( mortage £181'000, value:£230'000).

We have asked the mortage company A&L to increase the mortage but they were not intrested.

I have a good job(PAYE) and my wife is a full time house wife(looking for a part-time job)

Ive been on the CSSS site and put all all our figures in and they have worked out that we have no money left over to pay our creditors.
They have told us to just make nominal payments to them, but we cannot see them putting up with that.we were really surprised that was all they suggested.

We need to know what would be the best thing for us do?

Do you think that an IVA would be best for both of us or just one of us?

OUR main thing is to keep the house and a roof over our head.

We have thought about selling the house but we just will not get anything in this area for the girls to stay at their schools.

ANY advise would be really gratefull. Thank you for reading our post.

debtinfo

Hi, When looking at an IVA you are obviously going to need to either make a large lumpsum payment or regular payments for a number of years, it does not seem that you are able to do that. If you were paying the mortgage and secured loan and all household expenses but not unsecured creditors how much do you think you would have to spare each month

staffie1

My advice would be to visit your local CAB and see what they can do to help you.

elsie52

Hi,

I would speak to Payplan, they are also free. We started a DMP with them 2 years ago, owing £74k, and we are now down to £38k.. It would be worth a try surely. Good luck

Charco_2

is the mortgage in both names? is the secured loan in both names? Are you including the secured £21k as part of your £50k debt? (either way your supposed equity would match your debt roughly but it can matter). After the joint overdraft debt do your debts divide equally? (about £23k yours and £23k your wife). The fact your equity roughly matches your debt might indicate that your are not insolvent (so no IVA) but if you cant realise the equity and cant afford your repayments you are insolvent - weird, eh?

plummer_in_van

Hi, First of all many thanks to all of you who have replied to our posting,we really do appriciate it.Thanks.

Charco:Regards to questions:

Mortgage: Joint names.

Secured loan:Is in joint names,7 years left. NOT included in the 50k.

Credit card debts: Yeah roughly about equal amounts owed by both of us.

Each credit card is in our sole names. Two of them i think are still in my wife's maiden name!.(None of them are in joint names).
I have put as much of the credit card debt on the lowest %cards i could find and have Not put anymore on these so to keep them down

I have been through the house hold bills and have cut everything down as much as poss.

We have one personnell loan in my name only for £139.50 which has 12 months to run.

My youngest has just started school in Sept(09) so wife is looking to get a job.

I am just looking to get some breathing space for a couple of years to get things sorted. The one thing i dont want to do is start racking up loads of charges, for letters etc which i guess is wishful thinking.

Or do we just chuck it all in and try and start again??
Thanks Charco for taking the time to have a look at our post.

Charco_2

Sorry my replies aren't great. I'm not using a computer (on my phone and it's a nightmare). If i undertand correctly then, you have £50k debt and about £30k equity (or £25k debt each and £15k equity each) - still borderline whether you'd be technically insolvent or not. You have options, both of you, but i imagine your main consideration(s) will be your home and your equity. You can protect your home ok but you might need to use the equity to address your debts.

plummer_in_van

Many thanks for that Charco, Yes i want to protect the house, and we except that we do need to use some some of the money in the value of the house, BUT the main thing is like ive read on the forum when you owe a fair amount its very hard to release any money from your property!

What would the credit card companys do if say we just made a token payment say £20 to each of my wifes credit card companys? say for 6-12 months? Blacklisted?, Loads of charges?, Debt collection agencies?.

I did phone up a card company once and they were not intrested in anything i said!!!!. So i feel when somebody trys to approach these companys they just seem to brush you off.

I feel that we might be lucky enough to turn things around in 6-12 months if we are given a bit of breathing space buy some of the credit card companys. After all we WANT to pay back what we owe, we have just overstreched ourselves.WHICH WE WILL NOT BE DOING EVER AGAIN.

What do you think? Any chance of that happening?

many thanks

PLUMMER IN VAN

fiveyearplan

Contact one of the debt charities like CAB, National Debtline or CCCS. If they write to your creditors for you, they are much more likely to accept offers of token payments for a period of time.

Charco_2

Pardon me, but was the original post not that they HAD contacted one of those "charities" only to be offered a placebo!? "HELP I'VE GOT DEBT!"↲"you should deal with it then!"

slummymummyof3

Why don't you post a SOA so we can see where else you are spending money and we may be able to make some further suggestions of cutbacks?