Managing my Debt

braken2000

Hi Guys and Girls,

I know this is probabaly a dumb question as it probabaly asked thousands of times, but im getting nowhere (probabaly through stress).

I have, for lack of better expression, ballsed up and now have several debts which are by no means big (£450, £200 and a few others). These are to Credit Cards, the water board, catalogues. I am not paying the bills as I have let it snowball out of control and I am getting anything between 1-2 calls a day up to 15! I am scared to answer the phone, but I am not sure what to do.

I have a few questions:
1. Can I start a DMP with about £3000 - £3500 of debt? If so, how do I go about this? I have tried PayPlan but they were not interested.
2. I would rather all correspondance be in writing as I start to get tounge tied and say I will pay amounts I cant afford etc. How do I put this to them when they are threatening baliffs etc?

Thank you in advance!

Tom

Tixy

Hi Tom

Regarding the phone calls - you can send the telephone harrasment letter for a start - http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showpost.html?p=11571485&postcount=4
also if they ring then refuse to answer their security questions, that way they can't talk to you about the debt.

Your debt levels may be too small for the free organisations to be interested in helping (national debtlines minimum is £5k). But you could possibly think about doing a self-managed DMP, where you get advice from one of the charities but then actually manage the DMP and make payments yourself.

Firstly you need to distinguish between paying off priority debts/arrears and non priority, basically in this order, mortgage/rent, council tax, utilities, water, secured debts are all priority. Unsecured debts should come after this list and after basic living expenses. So from what you have listed so far the water looks like the one to take priority.

A good starting point might be to draw up a statement of affairs so you know exactly how much you have left for repayments and how much you owe in total to each creditor. Then people may be able to offer more advice and suggestions.

savingmummy

Hi and welcome.
Firstly you need to tell them that you wish to deal with it via post and no longer want calls - then you have proof of conversations too!
Can you agree to do repayments with them?

If you post your SOA on here we may be able to help especially as the debts are small. Even cutting down or stopping things for a while will help pay these debts outright! http://www.makesenseofcards.com/soacalc.html

STOP the cc useage if you havent already!

How much is water debt this is priorty

I had catalogue debts and found if you call their customer service and explain they do help.

I have no advise re DMP but others will help you there.