house repossession

desperado1_2

Iam due to go to court on the 29/1 for house repssession, and i cannot see anyway for us to be able to keep the house, does anybody have any advice of where i can get housing. The problem i have is that we can only afford about £650 per month rental and in my area which I have to remain in, this will only get a one bedroomed place, and with there being myself, husband and three kids it may be a bit packed.

Any advice would be eternally grateful.

CAn i also ask what sort of references private landlords require

thank you for your help

pinkpixie_2

Hi desperado1 I can't help with this but people will be along shortly who can. Just wanted to send you a big HUG in the meantime. Pink Pixie

James&Shell

I just wanted to say good luck and that i help everything goes well for you in the end.


James

Richard_S

desperado1 wrote:

Iam due to go to court on the 29/1 for house repssession, and i cannot see anyway for us to be able to keep the house, does anybody have any advice of where i can get housing. The problem i have is that we can only afford about £650 per month rental and in my area which I have to remain in, this will only get a one bedroomed place, and with there being myself, husband and three kids it may be a bit packed.

Any advice would be eternally grateful.

CAn i also ask what sort of references private landlords require

thank you for your help

Hi Desperado,

It's a little difficult to offer any meaningful advice without knowing a few more facts and figures; level and length of arrears, whether you're still paying anything off the mortgage, the amount of the mortgage payments. Do you have other debt problems? If you do and could demonstrate that you were taking action to address this then that would go in your favour at court.

The courts are usually sympathetic towards families having their homes repossessed especially when there are children involved. If you can afford to pay £650 month for rented accomodation then presumably you could pay this towards the mortgage and if the judge could see that you were making an effort to increase yr payments then the chances are you'd get some breathing space to be able to secure rented accomodation.

We had to look for rented accommodation after being declared bankrupt and it was a nightmare. Some of the estate agents wouldn't even entertain our enquiries because of the BKY, we rang every agent in our area and were fortunate enough to find one that said he would refer our details to the landlord and let us write a letter to go with the application and if we could state a good enough case then presumably the landlord wouldn't automatically disregard our application. We were absolutely over the moon when we were offered the house, it needed a lot of work doing to bring it up to scratch but it was a huge weight of our mind.

Our bank initiated repossession proceedings against us when we were genuinely trying to sell the place as part of the BKY proceedings and I couldn't believe the correspondence we got from the court giving us every opportunity to plead our case.

Hope things work out ok, and a few more details would help to generate more meaningful advice from the site.

Regards

Richard

lynzpower

first things first

you need to do a SOA, thats a statment of affairs, with all the info in- thats
income
expenditure
debt and APRs,

How many months have you missed?

desperado1_2

hI thank you all so much for your advice and wishing us luck.

We are currently four months in arrears this was mainly due to my husband injuring his back and was off work for approx 7 weeks with no income, when he returned to work at the end of october he had hardly any work on as a self employed scaffolder only bringing in about £150 a week, he tried to get work on other firms but with the time of season there was no work about.

Although my husband has a little bit of work on now he is still only bringing home about £150 per week, when we go to court we could not guarantee to the judge that we can afford the mortgage payments plus some arrears, hence i have it in my head that we will lose the house. My husbands work will pick up in the next few months as he has some contract work coming up, so our finances will increase a bit, but by then it will be too late regarding the house repossession.

that is why we can only afford at present about £650 pm on rental.

We do have loads of unsecured debt as well, but i am more worried about a roof over my childrens head first, do you think the council would help in any way
once again thank you all

our mortgage payments are £1147 per month, and we have not been able to pay anything to them fro the last 4 months

lynzpower

I used to work in social services, and I will tell you in my experience that you wont get any help from the council until the house has been reposessed and you have been formally evicted. this is because until you have been formally & legally evicted then you still legally have shelter that you can occupy.

as richard says its not a given adn there are other alternatives and other things could happen you need to take control NOW and do a FULL soa

did your hubby get incapcity benefit while he was off sick with his back?

desperado1_2

no he did not apply for incapcity allowance the two reasons being 1) he did not how long he was going to be out of action ie he thought it would get better in a week or so but of course that did not happen 2) because he was self employed he thought it would take ages to get a decision and by then he would have returned to work. On hindsight we should of just claimed but we never

Richard_S

lynzpower wrote:

I used to work in social services, and I will tell you in my experience that you wont get any help from the council until the house has been reposessed and you have been formally evicted. this is because until you have been formally & legally evicted then you still legally have shelter that you can occupy.

as richard says its not a given adn there are other alternatives and other things could happen you need to take control NOW and do a FULL soa

did your hubby get incapcity benefit while he was off sick with his back?

Lynz will correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that the council take the view that if you have your property repossessed they class that as "voluntarily making yourself homeless" and won't offer to help. I don't know if all councils work to the same criteria but that was certainly the view of our local authority.

You have two major issues to confront here,
1. repossession of your house
2. confronting yr debt problems

With regard to the house there's plenty of people that have first hand experience of this (us included) but I think you'd be well advised to contact CAB and ask their advice, or a solicitor if you can find one that offers a free initial consultation. You should quialify for legal aid if yr income is below a certain level.

Yr debt problems, as Lynz says, plenty of good solid advice on this site once you've managed to get a Statement of Income and Expenses (SOA) on the site.

Richard

desperado1_2

I appreciate all advise given.
I am aware that I have two problems to face, our house repossession and our debts, but I want to sort our housing problem out first and then i can face the debt problem. (although i do have an arrangement to pay them token payments each month)


What i do not understand if we are unable to pay our mortgage due to having no money and we get our house repossessed, how can the council say we intentionally made ourselves homeless, do they honestly think that i would be putting this stress on myself, husband and kids on purpose. Do they reall think i want my children to have no home, we just couldn't afford it

justruth

I found a private landlord most helpful when I lost my home a few years ago, I was upfront and honest with him, but had good references from my manager who said that my job was secure for at least 6 months. If I had not been able to get that (I didn't think my manager could write it, he probably couldn't) then the landlord wanted 6 months rent up front, and a lot fo the agencies were the same. My advice is to offer a larger deposit and see if that helps you secure a home.