Advice - Long Term joint debt (bank account)

marknlucas

Hi -

First time poster!!

To give you some background to my money dilemma, when married my wife ran up a load of debt on a bank account that was in our joint names (kept extending the overdraft, without my knowledge). I knew nothing of this, but as it was also in my name I am now responsible for repaying this back - according to the bank.

What it also means is that because of this I am unable to get divorced until the debt is cleared and therefore there are no longer any debts jointly held.

I was dubious of this and met with the bank with my ex and had hoped this not to be true - it was . Instead a repayment plan was drawn up, which covers this overdraft and another joint loan - that will have to paid up to March 2014 to clear it all.

It is shocking that because of what my wife has done - I am still held liable for this. However I can, grudgingly, kind of see the 'guilt by association' part of all of this. The loan part was created (jointly) to pay for this doomed marriage (wedding)!!

I looked into paying off just my half of the debt (£5k), but the repayments worked out higher than the current repayment plan and I still wouldn't be able to proceed with a divorce, as the FULL debt needs to be cleared and I would be waiting on my ex paying her half. So, as it stands, I won't be clear of this until March 2014. The only solution I have thought of is take on the full debt and pay it off in full - but I think I would be crazy to do this, as it lets my ex off the hook and is probably exactly what she is hoping will happen.

Any advice/similar experiences, greatly appreciated - as it kind of feels like my life is now on hold until I get this weight off my shoulders!

Thanks

RAS

You can certainly get diivorced and as part of the financial settlement you may be able to prove that some of the debt was accrued by your ex for her own benefit. It may then be decided that she has to take responsibility for that debt.

However, if you push this as far a court, it will cost you a lot more than £5K.

Actually divorcing means downloading the paperwork from the web and filling it in. I think unreasonable behaviour should cover her duplicity. It will cost about £400 to file the paperwork and get
proceedings going.

Thegirl

The problem I can foresee is that your wife may not keep up her repayments between now and 2014. Do you really want to be relying on her to make payments? If she doesn't make the payments is that not going to mean more defaults in your name? If so, how much is that going to cost you in the future on your credit rating?
Also, I got divorced whilst having a joint bank account debt with my then husband. I am not sure how if this is a problem, it never came up as an issue then. That said I have been divorced 12 years now and my bank were terrible over the whole thing at the time, they may well have changed the rules since to stop similar issues to those that I had.
I also ended up having to clear the whole debt myself (plus all other debt accumculated during our marriage). On reflection, small price to pay to have any connection to my ex removed. Didn't feel like that at the time though!