New to the game ....

Indebtandcurious

Hiya,

I am about to start (re-start) paying back my catalogue debts that I have racked up since the age of 19 (now 22). I had originally been paying them back, as the items bought from the catalogue were mainly for my ex-partner, but when we split I was annoyed as the debt I was paying was for him (in a sense), and not myself.

Well, the amount of catalogues I owe money to is unreal, I have them chasing me at all angles, and I now feel really cornered.

I have contacted a few of the catalogues, and said that I will pay a minimum payment a month, though the payment is not as low as I had hoped for. Basically, is there anyway I can reduce the payments I am currently making on some of the catalogues? How do I go about this? And are there any letters etc that I need to send.

Also, because of the amount of missed payments there have been is there anyway that I can claim the charges accumlated and paid for so far back? And if so can I do this before I finish paying off the long list of catalogues (as this will help with my payments to them), and if so how do I go about doing it?

Sorry to ramble, and sorry to sound so young and stupid, I am not proud in the slightest of the debts I racked up, and I am genuinely going to try and clear them.

Any help and advice would be appreciated.

Thank you,

Hayley :A

bottleofred

Hi Hayley and welcome to the forum,

There is no need to apologise for anything, as we have all got into debt at some point and it's how you get out of it that's important. Only pay your catalogue companies what you can afford after you have paid for essentials such as rent, electricity, food etc. They won't like it, but if you can only afford to pay £1 per week/month as a token payment then do that. You should contact the catalogue companies and explain the circumstances you are currently in and ask them to freeze the interest otherwise you'll never be able to get out of debt. Regarding claiming back the charges, I'm not sure, but hopefully someone with more knowledge than me will be along soon.

Good luck in getting sorted

Indebtandcurious

Hello,

Thank you for your reply to my thread, are there any letter outlines that I can use online to send these letters? Do I send a cheque? How often do companies (catalogues) agree to the token payment I have offered etc?

Thank you

bottleofred

Hi Hayley,

I'm not entirely sure what your personal financial circumstances are, but you may wish to contact the consumer credit counselling service, citizens advice or national debtline to discuss your options further. I think they may have template letters on their sites, but I'll also look on the forum to see if I can find anything for you and if I do, will post it later. Regarding the companies, as I said earlier, they will try to get you to pay as much as possible, but pay what you can afford without leaving yourself short of cash for the necessities discussed earlier. You could put the cheque in the post to them with a letter explaining your circumstances etc. If I can find any suitable letter I'll post it on the thread later.

Hannah_10

It's a step by step process Hayley, your first step is to make a SOA (a statement of affairs). Have a read of this post here and then follow the link in the post to a really simple SOA calculator.

When you've done your SOA it will show what you have coming in, what you need to live on, what's left over (if anything, sometimes it shows a minus number here) and who you owe money to and at what rate. After we've seen your SOA we might be able to help you with a few of the things on it, so for example people commonly forget certain catagories (eg car MOT) or we can help them reduce spending in others (such as telephone).

Then after that, when the SOA is definately right and as accurate as it's gonna get the next step is working out what creditor gets what amount. There are different ways to split it up- it all depends how much you've got and what they current repayments look like and so on. So we'll leave that step for a moment, for now the first thing is the SOA, click this link...
https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/107280