DMP & Mutual Support Thread - Part 8

Time_to_face_the_music

johnny324 wrote: »

Can this man continue to do this? Will anybody help me? Would the police be at all interested in helping me or would they just not bother and side with him because I owe him money? Can I get some sort of restraining order/injunction against this man or does the fact that I owe him money mean I can't really do anything to stop him?

I can only agree with the other advice already given. You need to go to the police and report this. He sounds extremely unstable and the situation could suddenly deteriorate into something worse than verbal harassment.

Debt is not a crime and you do not deserve this appalling treatment.

Please report it Johnny and let us know how you get on. Good luck with getting this sorted

londonfraggle

Hello all, not written for a while but as usual have been lurking around and glad to see some familiar faces and some newbies too. Hope you've all had a fab weekend and not got too drenched!!

I'm after some advice pretty please. As some of the oldies here will know, I've been on my DMP for about 3 years now and in that time I have hugely reduced my debt - only another year to go and poss less if I up my payments!

Here is my question. I am considering taking over my DMP myself. The reason for this is that I am already paying all creditors well over the contractual required payments and I am keen to pay off a few of the small ones. I am also in a position to up my monthly payment (pay rise) and am due a review, but don't really want to increase it as am in fact getting married in a few months so would like to use this money to put towards that.

All in all, I am in a much better place now than I was a few years ago and know for certain I won't get myself into debt ever again, but I would like a bit more self control of my finances again and the ability to save for my wedding rather than pay even more towards my creditors who are already getting a good sum back now.

I wondered if anyone had any experiences of going it alone having been with a DMP provider first? How did your creditors react? Of course as most of mine have stopped interest and charges I am hoping that will continue (although I do of course accept that they could start adding at any time).

How did you make the transition? I've seen a few boards which recommend doing nothing at all other than a) let your DMP provider know you will be doing it yourself and then b) just carry on making the payments to your creditors yourself via standing order?

Would be very grateful for anyone's thoughts on the going it alone thing and also the best way to handle it with minimum disruption?

Happy Monday tomorrow to everyone!
Fraggle xx

mummum2

londonfraggle wrote: »

Hello all, not written for a while but as usual have been lurking around and glad to see some familiar faces and some newbies too. Hope you've all had a fab weekend and not got too drenched!!

I'm after some advice pretty please. As some of the oldies here will know, I've been on my DMP for about 3 years now and in that time I have hugely reduced my debt - only another year to go and poss less if I up my payments!

Here is my question. I am considering taking over my DMP myself. The reason for this is that I am already paying all creditors well over the contractual required payments and I am keen to pay off a few of the small ones. I am also in a position to up my monthly payment (pay rise) and am due a review, but don't really want to increase it as am in fact getting married in a few months so would like to use this money to put towards that.

All in all, I am in a much better place now than I was a few years ago and know for certain I won't get myself into debt ever again, but I would like a bit more self control of my finances again and the ability to save for my wedding rather than pay even more towards my creditors who are already getting a good sum back now.

I wondered if anyone had any experiences of going it alone having been with a DMP provider first? How did your creditors react? Of course as most of mine have stopped interest and charges I am hoping that will continue (although I do of course accept that they could start adding at any time).

How did you make the transition? I've seen a few boards which recommend doing nothing at all other than a) let your DMP provider know you will be doing it yourself and then b) just carry on making the payments to your creditors yourself via standing order?

Would be very grateful for anyone's thoughts on the going it alone thing and also the best way to handle it with minimum disruption?

Happy Monday tomorrow to everyone!
Fraggle xx

Hi Fraggle,

I was originally with a fee paying DMC (Sterling Green), I was very pleased with the way they handled my debt at first, before finding this place! they did put my mind at ease! Go creditors to stop interest, apart from Lloyds, credit card (that's for another post, not their fault I think, Lloyds are just :mad:).

After a while (almost 3 years), I decided to branch out on my own and to be honest have never looked back. I sent a mail to all my creditors (had 7), now down to 5 stating that I was going out on my own and will be paying them a bit more as no longer will be paying a fee to SG. They all bar Santander agreeed, but asked them to give me details for setting up standing orders, which was given to me. I have been self-managing and apart from Llloyds (credit card), their loan department have frozen interest and they sold my overdraft debt to Apex (who has been excellent). I'm tired of them, because the amount I pay is only reducing the debt by a small amount as most is eaten up with interest. If I didn't have a mortgage I would stop paying them, but at least it's going down!

So after the long history, lol: I would say go for it and good luck, I'm glad I did. Last month I did a new E&I (because N/R asked for one!), again all accepted payment. I'm relaxed and happy that nothing has come to bite me, and hoping that this will be the case till I finish on the journey!

Let me know if there's anything else you might not be sure of!

MM2

breezerbum

I have sent off statements to CCCS, sent letters to creditors and made token payments to creditors too. I am just waiting to find out what happens next - do CCCS contact me with details for me to log in to my plan so I can see which creditors accept reduced payments?
I am feeling quite nervous about waiting to see who will be ok with reduced payments. Has anyone had any issues with the following companies accepting:

RBS (loan and overdraft)
Santander
Debenhams (Santander)
Virgin (MBNA)
Sainsbury's
Capital One
Barclaycard
Simply Be
Studio
Next
Freemans
M&S (loan)
M&S (store card)

It would be good if you could let me know.

Thanks

Breezerbum

Growurown

breezerbum wrote: »

Santander
Virgin (MBNA)
Capital One

These three stopped interest straight away when I went on my DMP. Don't know about the rest, but most of our creditors stopped interest apart from the Halifax.

Time_to_face_the_music

breezerbum wrote: »

M&S (loan)
M&S (store card)

M&S card stopped interest after about 2 months
M&S loan refuse to stop or reduce interest

Both state they will review our arrangement after a year

Good luck breezerbum

2spicy

anubis77 wrote: »

Hi,

Looking for some advice please. Have been on a DMP with CCCS for a year now, the debts are down to £30k and all with the original creditors. Main creditors are MBNA and First Direct.
I think MBNA have defaulted me to to be honest not really sure.

We have recently received a lump sum of c.£20k.

Should we:
a) deal direct with the creditors
b) leave it to CCCS

Also, should we:
a) Just offer the £20k or
b) Offer less ???
c) Ask the creditors what they want to settle?

Any advice gratefully received.

Thanks.

Hi, speaking to my DMP company, I was advised that if this situation happened to me, then I could choose who to pay off with it.
as long as the repayments to the creditors was not subsequently reduced, there would be no issues.
CCCs I do believe adopt the Pro-Rata approach in that you should divide the money pro-rata between all your creditors.

Personally, I would write to yoru creditors and ask them how much they would accept as full and final settlement of your account with them and take it from there... If they want to play ball, then go for it ... if they dont, then its up to you.
Personally, I would make them offers and see if they bite.

wannabee_in_credit

Just a quick query from me that I'm wondering if anyone can help with. I had massive trouble getting Natwest bank to accept that I was in a dmp for my overdraft with them and it took almost 18 months of fighting to get them to acknowledge my payments, and I've been passed over to their collections department. I've had no contact at all from them since August last year so I don't know what my current balance is or if I'm still being charged fees or anything. I sent them a letter last week to ask for up to date information. Just wondering how long I should give them to reply?
Thanks people

Time_to_face_the_music

wannabee_in_credit wrote: »

Just a quick query from me that I'm wondering if anyone can help with. I had massive trouble getting Natwest bank to accept that I was in a dmp for my overdraft with them and it took almost 18 months of fighting to get them to acknowledge my payments, and I've been passed over to their collections department. I've had no contact at all from them since August last year so I don't know what my current balance is or if I'm still being charged fees or anything. I sent them a letter last week to ask for up to date information. Just wondering how long I should give them to reply?
Thanks people

Hi wannabe_in_credit

Did you ever have online banking with NatWest? One of our debts is a NatWest OD and we can still access this and check it online and we actually set up the online service AFTER we had set up the DMP

If you can't do this, can you actually call into your branch and insist on a statement, my OH did this while we were waiting for the password on the online account and after about 30 minutes arguing and him mentioning various threats such as the financial ombudsman, they went off and came back with a statement.

NatWest are a huge problem and we are not optimistic of them ever freezing or reducing our OD interest, even though they have now stopped the CC interest. They refused to accept the DMP offer stating that it was not proportionally fair to them. CCCS checked the figures and said it was correct and when we rechecked them, they actually seem to be getting about 3% more than their share. They constantly add on interest, over limit charges, late payments etc and I have been open on here before in saying that we do pay them over and above the CCCS payment. We know we should not do it but in the first month they added £285 of charges and we were not willing for that to carry on to the next and susequent months, cancelling out the CCCS payment and adding more on to the balance :mad:

Good luck and please let us know how you get on.

wannabee_in_credit

Time_to_face_the_music wrote: »

Hi wannabe_in_credit

Did you ever have online banking with NatWest? One of our debts is a NatWest OD and we can still access this and check it online and we actually set up the online service AFTER we had set up the DMP

If you can't do this, can you actually call into your branch and insist on a statement, my OH did this while we were waiting for the password on the online account and after about 30 minutes arguing and him mentioning various threats such as the financial ombudsman, they went off and came back with a statement.

NatWest are a huge problem and we are not optimistic of them ever freezing or reducing our OD interest, even though they have now stopped the CC interest. They refused to accept the DMP offer stating that it was not proportionally fair to them. CCCS checked the figures and said it was correct and when we rechecked them, they actually seem to be getting about 3% more than their share. They constantly add on interest, over limit charges, late payments etc and I have been open on here before in saying that we do pay them over and above the CCCS payment. We know we should not do it but in the first month they added £285 of charges and we were not willing for that to carry on to the next and susequent months, cancelling out the CCCS payment and adding more on to the balance :mad:

Good luck and please let us know how you get on.

They are hard work Natwest.... definitely the most difficult of my creditors.
I used to have online banking but there are no accounts there any more when I go on. Hopefully they'll respond to my letter but I'm really hoping that I can get another complaint on the go. If I've not heard by the next time I'm off work I'll go into a branch somewhere and start kicking off.