Help... Been paying debt for 6 years now

dancingfairy

Hi. You need to find out how much you still owe each company. Depending on how much you owe them and how much you are paying them you pay be able to reach a settlement with them.
Also you need to see whether you had PPI as Ras advised you.
How much can you afford to pay towards your debts each month? Obviously if you can pay more than 50 a month then your debts will get paid off quicker - what are your cirucumstances? ie do you own a house or car (this will affect what options you have). Are you working full time/part time or on benefits? Your options will be different depending on your circumstances.
It would help though if you knew how much you owed each creditor.
I am thinking about making settlement offers or perhaps a DRO or bankruptcy but without any further info it's difficult to say. In terms of settlements as the debts have been sold on (perhaps several times over the last 6 years) they may well take a small settlement as oppposed to you paying the debt back for years to come. Can you get uptodate balances on your account from your debt company?
df

Thrifty_Pixie

spacey2012 wrote: »

You need some better advice from the board pundits.
You may be able to challenge the debt agencies to cough up signed agreements, they may not have them after all this time.
If you PM the user fermi they have some template letters to send them to ask them to prove the debts.
If they can not, you can stop paying.

i'm not sure this is good advice.

a debt management company would already have thought of this before they arranged payments. also, the fact that the OP's been paying the debts is surely an admission of ownership of those debts.

Z4k1987

Your advice is all so different ahhhh what do I do ? I work full time but live with my parents no house as its owned by parents

Time_to_face_the_music

Z4k1987 wrote: »

Your advice is all so different ahhhh what do I do ? I work full time but live with my parents no house as its owned by parents

I think there is a consensus of opinion that you should dump the fee paying DMP provider.

Check out this thread

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/4228011

mildredalien

It's probably a good idea to get an up to date statement of what you owe to each company - the good thing is you know exactly who you owe money to! Can you still only afford to pay £50/month? You may be able to up your payments if you are working full time and living with your parents, which will mean getting all of the debts sorted much sooner. You could try making settlement offers to each creditor. Even if they won't accept less than 100% (and frankly after 2-3 companies take over, they have paid a pittance for your debts and will often accept a much lower percentage, sometimes 50% or even less) you can see if you can make a bigger dent and pay off some of the smaller debts.

P.s. DEFINITELY ditch the company. You are paying them 38% of the money you are trying to use to pay off your debts just for the privilege of doing a bit of paperwork that you could do yourself, or someone like Stepchange would do for free!!! Get rid ASAP.

dancingfairy

O.K I would rank the ideas as follows:
Personally I think challenging whether they have the correct legal paperwork is a bit dodgy morally since you've had the money (however I'm sure some would argue that they've had more than their fairshare in interest overthe years and that it's their own fault for not getting theirpaperwork in order).
1) Seeing if you can recalaim PPI. Their have been rulings that in a lot of cases it was missold and you should be able to get it back.
2) Getting a settlement figure, clearly if you can agree a one-off settlement figure it will be better than continuing to pay on a monthly basis.
3) If all else fails then do a dmp (debt management plan) but with one of the free agencies. I think that this won't be necessary with a combination of 1 and 2.

First off write and reclaim PPI then try for full and final settlements (make sure you double chceck the wording tocheck they can't sell the remainder of the debt on and thatthey will mark your credit file in the correct way).
df