DRO Help

Frankie231

It's probably best to give you a little bit of background on the entire situation so I'll do my best, it's not the full story as that would take me days to write and I don't want to put people to sleep as they're reading.

Me and my partner are in around £12,000 to £13,000 worth of debt. I don't know the exact figures but I am working on getting them and should hopefully have them soon, this is with approximatley 14 different creditors (not all of them a CC and loans etc, some are bill contracts that we thought were paid up and weren't).

This time last year I had my daughter, and it forced us to face up to the fact that we were up a certain creek without a paddle and we decided to face our debts. We signed up with DFH Financial Solutions (not the worst mistake we've made, but certainly in the top 10) and they managed to stop all interest/charges on all of our accounts (which I was suprised with) and we slowly started whittling our way through our money problems while liing their pockets in the process.

We were managing quite well until September of this year when my partner lost his job (without a payout). He is looking for work but so far has found nothing, and we have taken a massive hit in our income as we are now on benefits.

I sat down a few days ago and went through our income/expanditure and we are in negative numbers on a monthly basis. We have pretty much spent the past month since OH loosing his job, taking off Peter to pay Paul. Peter's now as broke as we are.

I cancelled DFH immediatly upon realising this (they were quite good about it when I explained the situation, suprisingly) however, even without this cost we are still in negative numbers. Meaning we're going to have to cut back even more (not sure how, but we will manage it). This leaves up with the problem though, that we cannot afford to pay our debts at all. Not even a token payment. I spent last night researching possible solutions and the one that kept cropping up was a DRO.

This is something that we are now seriously considering, but it's not something that we're taking lightly. Last year we made a concious decision to pay our debt, we understood that we had got ourselves into this situation, and we wanted to get ourselves out of it, the simple fact is though; right now there is no way that we can and the worry that this is putting on us both is causing massive problems. I was diagnosed with PND last year and while we could afford to pay something; it was still affecting me but certainly not as much as it has been for the last 2 months.

So, I was wondering what the actual process of obtaining a DRO was? How long (on average) it takes to come into effect? What would happen to the items we have on HP (we have a bed and a washing machine, we took them out when we had more money and if they were trivial items I would send them back, but they're nearly paid off and I couldnt live without them, especially not with a 15 month old getting changed half a dozen times a day)? And what would happen if/when OH finds a job, would the DRO be cancelled and would we then be able to set up a DMP?

Thanks in advance

dojoman

Try posting in the DRO thread, you should get more help/advice there


https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/1385275

Frankie231

Thanks, shall do that now