Just beginning a journey and need advice please

rodgerramjet

Debtfree_angel wrote: »

Dear all,

Thanks for your help, I actually called step change yesterday and they put my mind at rest. I had been told that they wouldn't/couldn't deal with pay day loans but I'm happy to hear about them.

My only concern is that they take four weeks to get something through and I don't want to come under pressure from the payday loan people.

Does anyone have any experience with swift sterling? They seem to be most unhelpful?

Hi,

I ve dealt with Swift Sterling and I agree they are very unhelpful, they will not agree to a plan until they realise they have no hope of getting the money in full.

You have to be relentless is your dealing with them, its worth it in the end trust me.

PM me if you want to.

Trajal

I have vast experience of this myself, trust me you are not alone in making bad financial decisions during poorly thought-out relationships! I wasn't in a position to be able to deal with these pay day companies through their "interest" mechanisms so I took the route to default them all at the same time.

If this sounds likely to be a similar thing then trust me, the first thing to do is to set up a new bank account with a completely different bank and make sure your pay and your essential (Rent/Council tax etc) bills go to/from that.

Then you need to learn to ignore your mobile telephone because they will call you incessently. At one point I was getting around 15-20 calls a day. Ignore it. If you don't know the number of the person calling, don't answer. Put it on silent. Add them as contacts and change the names of those numbers harrassing you to 'DO NOT ANSWER' so you don't make a mistake.

They will all start to write to you - respond by post stating that you will deal with them by post and offer a token amount as a temporary measure while you sort out your finances. They will without fail default you. Some may deal with it themselves, often just a department with a 'lawyery' sounding name that tries to pretend it's not the same company. Others may sell the debt on to a debt collection agency (DCA). Same tactic for the DCA's - ignore the calls, write to them and state only to contact you by post, make your token offer.

All of this defaulting and debt swapping around etc. will actually work to your benefit as you won't be doing any payments to those in the meantime. You can use the extra money to pay several off them off finally within a couple of months (at least I was able to).

After that just take the snowball route, pay tokens to most but choose one at a time to pay off a big chunk to settle it. It's quite enjoyable watching them get paid off one by one and as each drops out you'll get that extra £10-20 a month to pay more off onto the next one. Depending on your token payment size (I find that they were very amenable to £10-20 a month) of course. It won't make much difference if you choose £1 a month tokens!

What this will do is absolutely ruin your credit file for 6 years. Is that a bad thing? Well it's not great, but it's not the worst thing that can happen. Certainly not having access to mainstream credit can be inconvenient but it's quite a good life lesson to learn to spend only money that you have in the bank for a few years. Depending on how long it takes to pay them off, it is actually a decent opportunity to build up some savings too.

When you become debt free, and just have these nasty defaults on your file, remember to put a fund together in a separate account someone of £1k or so, only for use in an emergency. It's basically the equivalent of reaching for a credit card or a payday loan if your car fails its MOT and needs new break pads, but with the advantage that its your own money and you have already paid for it.