Hire Purchase Help!

treasach

Hi all, sorry this is abit of long winge

We have a hire purchase with a big bank (worst mistake of our lifes) and back in December due to me been out of work we missed a payment. In Jan we quickly repayed the arrear and we were back on track.

However, the missed payment in December had changed the payment method from Direct Debit to paying by card. We sent the Mandate back in Feb to set up the DD but they did not take the payment, so we had to pay over the phone which they charged us a £12 admin charge.

The next month came, we sent the mandate back but they did not take out the payment so another charge for us, this now has gone on upto present and still the DD has not been set back up, I've sent mandates by recorded delivery, I've spoken to advisors requesting to set it up but still no DD.

So I sent a complaint letter threatening the Financial Ombudsman, in with the complaint letter I put another mandate. Guess what, they received the complaint letter but not the mandate!! they then said that they haven't received the last 4 mandates and the one they did receive my bank cancelled with no reason!

I've spoken to my bank and they have no requests in the last 5 months to set a DD up.

We have another 3 years on the HP and this is adding alot of expense we can't afford!

I wish we could just give them the car back and forget the whole thing now

I hope you can help

Si

jintyblue

Hi
I recently "gave my car back to the finance company" through voluntary termination fo the contract - and got a newer car for cheaper payments and lower road tax, petrol etc.
Check through your agreement for the part that says termination - and there should be an amount of money that is the minimum repayment - if you have paid this amount then look into voluntary termination. I have done it with my last 2 cars and my new car is a HP too - so will probably do the same with this car (Ive checked and the minimum payment is around half the price quoted for the car - so im paying less than what the car is worth - and only need to keep it until Ive paid this amount, usually about 2years.)
This does not effect your credit rating as far as I know - I checked my experian report and the old car finance is showing up as settled even though I still had £1K to pay on it.

Its worth looking into anyway

:rotfl:

treasach

I've checked the agreement and it does indeed say that once I have paid a certain amount back and providing that the car has been looked after and there are no arrears on the account I can hand the car back, we are close to the amount as well so this will be a big help!! thank you very much for pointing this out to me

It definately doesn't affect your credit rating though?

jintyblue

Sorry for late reply, I had lost the thread - no it shows up on my credit report as account settled. Basically what happened in my case was that they came to collect the car and put it on a transporter lorry after checking it - and take it straight to auction. The reason we were getting rid of ours was because there was something wrong with it but no-one knew what it was lol! We videoed it being driven onto the lory so there was no comeback on us i.e. it was running when we signed it over. The driver said that he was picking up a non-runner later that day so even that must be ok.
The first stage is to phone your finance company and tell them you want to voluntarily terminate your agreement, they then send you paperwork which you read and sign and send back to them (recorded), then they will let you know if your car is being collected or some cases you need to take it somewhere - that is really all there is too it.
I used TCB and signed up to experian just before I did it so I could check my report after it nd got £12 cashback, plus a new car which is cheaper to run and the rest of my loan written off.

If you google "voluntary termination of hire purchase" loads of people have done it - so good luck with it, but the twice I have done it, it has been really easy (it generally takes around a month to have everything sorted out paperwork wise - but its worth it.)