DMP & Mutual Support Thread - Part 8

Growurown

Time_to_face_the_music wrote: »

You are just saying that in case she sends you to Siberia

:rotfl::rotfl::rotfl::rotfl::rotfl:

MrDJB192

Spoke to each and every one of my creditors today - here's the outcome so far (my first payment of £482 is due 1st Jan:

Halifax OD - £2500 - No charges or interest to be charged for 12 months
Barclays CC - £2340 - 30 day hold - pending review of my situation
Halifax OD -£86 - No charges or interest to be charged for 12 months
Halifax CC -£3929 - 30 day hold - pending review of my situation
MBNA - £3380 - No Charges or interest to be added for at least 6 months
Virgin MBNA - £2520 - No Charges or interest to be added for at least 6 months
Nationwide CC - £2991 - 30 day hold - no confirmation of contact from myself or StepChange
QuickQuid - £875 - No Additional Interest to be charged
Sainsburys - £7425 - Interest remaining at 8ish%

Happy with most - sainsburys, not so happy but i'll work on that

Had a job interview yesterday too for a second (16 hours a week) role fitting around my career job - seemed to go well so here's hoping!! :j

MrDJB192

MrDJB192 wrote: »

For example, I owe 875 to quick quid and my monhly payment to these is £275....what if they freeze interest and one of my other creditors doesn't....surley its best to pay more off of that one!?

In terms of this - i spoke to Step Change today who advised this was a clerical error....they usually offer 5% of the balance but for some reason made a mistake here. They've now rejigged and QuickQuid will be paid less (which will make them really happy!) although the other 8 creditors will all get a slightly bigger piece of the action so that'll do me

I'm still blogging the whole process if anyone is interested - PM me

catandy

Ive bitten the bullet and sent my form back to stepchange, opened my new bank account, arranged for my benefit to be paid into there and told SC that my budget will have to be amended - i was told by the JC staff that because I was sacked from my trial period of my job (not hitting sales target on run up xmas) I would be sanctioned for my benefit so will have 10% taken off me for 13 weeks - so everything is still up in the air...

just got to see it through and get it all sorted - pity that xmas is at the wrong time this year so its going to take a bit longer than it should be doing!

At this rate the figures should be set and first DD to stepchange should be mid/ late January - providing I find out how much benefit im going to be receiving that is....

fun this isnt it to begin with?? (that was meant as sarcasm btw)..

Hopelessly_Hopeful

catandy wrote: »

Ive bitten the bullet and sent my form back to stepchange, opened my new bank account, arranged for my benefit to be paid into there and told SC that my budget will have to be amended - i was told by the JC staff that because I was sacked from my trial period of my job (not hitting sales target on run up xmas) I would be sanctioned for my benefit so will have 10% taken off me for 13 weeks - so everything is still up in the air...

just got to see it through and get it all sorted - pity that xmas is at the wrong time this year so its going to take a bit longer than it should be doing!

At this rate the figures should be set and first DD to stepchange should be mid/ late January - providing I find out how much benefit im going to be receiving that is....

fun this isnt it to begin with?? (that was meant as sarcasm btw)..

Well done on getting started. New year new start.

HHx

Enough_Now

So I finally got my Excel spreadsheet set up and all of my December statement balances input and, yes, my debt has increased - but only by 1.3%.

I've heard back from most of the creditors now and only one is refusing to reduce interest (Sainsburys CC), due to the StepChange payment being more than the minimum. So that debt will be incurring a whopping 29.9% interest.

Anyway, I hope that I will feel a bit happier in the New Year, when I see the other balances reducing.

Merry Christmas all and thanks for helping me start on the DMP journey.

EN xx

Hunnies

Hi,
I'm still reading the thread every week but don't get much chance to post but today I have a few minutes so thought I would.

In the last week we've had letters from 4 of our creditors to say they are passing the debt on. Lloyds (2 x cc's) has been refered to SCM Solicitor's who Stepchange tell me are an internal collections office at LLoyds. Halifax have sent our c/c debt to Westcot (again internal company I believe) and Barclaycard have sent our debt to Mercer's who I think is external but according to Stepchange it's good news as they are very easy to get along with and will be likely to offer us F&F settlements in the future, although at the moment we have no saving's so that won't be much good for us.

We also received letters from NRAM saying we might be eligible for the refund against our unsecured loan taken out in 2005 for approx £8000 so we've got to wait to see what happens there but fingers crossed. I guess there's no chance of them actually sending a cheque out if we still owe them on our DMP is there?

Everything else seems to be running ok, a couple of our creditors are still charging interest but I'm going to write to them again to ask them to review it.

Great to see everyone else is getting on well and good luck for all the newbies just starting out.

I hope you all have a relaxing Christmas and we can all look forward to a new year where we are taking control of our debt and seeing it decrease! x

Prowler1973

Hello there,

My plan starts in January. Just looking forward to the calls and letters. Hope all is getting by and getting free from debt. Good luck all and enjoy Christmas.

lizzy23

Hi all 2 months in now, and everything seems to have settled down, the only people still charging interest are the bank on our 2 overdrafts so will tackle that in the new year, hope everyone has a great christmas, and heres to owing a lot less this time next year

Time_to_face_the_music

Good morning everyone

Well it's almost the end of 2012 and we are at the end of month 11 on our DMP. This time last year, we were in a very bad place, though we were putting on a good show of being happy and ready for Christmas. The reality was having no idea how we would pay the bills in January then we faced up to facts and added up how much we owed. It was one of the worst moments of my life when we realised it was £81,306. That was a light bulb moment and then some!

I had never heard of a DMP this time last year and had never visited the MSE website, now I spout off about DMPs all the time and am never away from this place

So where are we, 11 months down the line?

On paper we have paid off £18,762.86 or an average of £1705 per month. This is actually a lot more as we have had a massive amount of interest, account charges and we also had a couple of debts we did not add to our DMP as they were buy now pay laters and we thought we could manage them. An educated guess takes our true payments for the year to approximately £22,000 :eek:

We have paid off a total of 23.1% of our debt. If it kills me I will get this to 25% by the end of the 12 month so watch out for the 25% figure in my signature at the end of next month. :j

We have realised that while we valued the start up from CCCS (now StepChange), we will be better taking this over on our own to have the flexibility we need when the creditors play dirty.

With the help of the FOS, we have battled Lloyds TSB and NatWest and won. We fought hard against M&S too but were defeated in that one. :mad:

If someone had told me last year that we would have done all of this and be almost one quarter of the way to paying off that massive debt, we never would have believed them. But we have done it and it's all down to the advice, help and support of this forum and particularly this thread. :T

So I finish with a truly heartfelt thanks to you all and offer my very best wishes for a peaceful and happy Christmas and New Year. Let's all raise a glass to more help, support and debt busting in 2013 :beer:

TTFTM x