Can I change from a managed DMP to doing it myself?

abbylou

Dh and I have been on a DMP with Debtline for 4 years. With hindsight we would never had started it but we were in a desperate place at the time and it got us out of a bad place. When we add up how much we have paid them over the 4 years in monthly fees we could cry!
Anyway, we feel on top of the plan but feel as though we are getting nowhere. Whenever we ask for an approximate debt-free date they can't give us one and that worries me. It feels like we'll never be debt-free.
Dh and I have decided that in the new year we really need to take the bull by the horns and do something about this debt. We would like to try and manage the debt plan ourselves now and put the £60 a month fee into the debt. Do you think this is doable? If we ring the companies and say this is what we have been doing, this is our plan do you think they will accept. Our plan is to tell them we are now managing ourselves and we will pay them all either slightly more or quite a bit more. We will have a bit more monthly money available from January to put on the debt. Some companies have frozen the interest so planning on adding the most of the extra onto those that haven't. Do people think the companies will go for it or are we opening a can of worms by changing? We have never missed payments to any of them since being on the plan which must go in our favour. We just want to be able to see an end to all this.

Toomuchdebt

Instead of self managing you could switch to stepchange who will do it for free.Some companies can be a bit funny if you try and self manage debts.If you have extra to pay towards debt you have to distribute it equally amongst the creditors or you will be seen as favouring one over the other.

sistafromanothermista

abbylou wrote: »

Dh and I have been on a DMP with Debtline for 4 years. With hindsight we would never had started it but we were in a desperate place at the time and it got us out of a bad place.

When we add up how much we have paid them over the 4 years in monthly fees we could cry!

Anyway, we feel on top of the plan but feel as though we are getting nowhere. Whenever we ask for an approximate debt-free date they can't give us one and that worries me. It feels like we'll never be debt-free.

Dh and I have decided that in the new year we really need to take the bull by the horns and do something about this debt. We would like to try and manage the debt plan ourselves now and put the £60 a month fee into the debt. Do you think this is doable?

If we ring the companies and say this is what we have been doing, this is our plan do you think they will accept?
Our plan is to tell them we are now managing ourselves and we will pay them all either slightly more or quite a bit more.
We will have a bit more monthly money available from January to put on the debt. Some companies have frozen the interest so planning on adding the most of the extra onto those that haven't.

Do people think the companies will go for it or are we opening a can of worms by changing? We have never missed payments to any of them since being on the plan which must go in our favour. We just want to be able to see an end to all this.

Is debtline a free DMP service?

abbylou

Thanks. I did wonder about spreading equally but how would they know? We did look into Stepchange last year but they wanted us to spend quite a large amount more per month than we were comfortable with. I guess we could look into it again now we have a little extra. My only concern with changing from one company to another is the crossover. If payments are not made quickly enough or on the right date it will upset the creditors. We had no missed payments on anything until we started the DMP and in the time between setting it up and them getting their first payment we did. I just though if we managed it ourselves we would be more in control of when payments go out and also increasing them when funds allow.

abbylou

No sista it's not. I think there is a company called National Debtline but this is definitely one who manages for you but charges. I think we pay about £60 a month for the privilege.

yoshiyella

I have personally just done this (though my fee was £25 a month). I asked my DMP how much was outstanding with each creditor and how much was being paid to them. I then shared the fee equally amongst my 11 creditors and sent them an email (had to call 2 of them) and they all agreed apart from 2 who asked me to fill in an Income and Expenditure form and on receiving this they also agreed. I set up all payments to them via standing order and said to them that any extra money I can pay in at any point then I would do so. On my DMP it would have taken me 3 years to pay off everything but like you they would not give me a time scale so its my rough calculations and now on my own I am free of them within 2 years All I would say is keep a file of everything, every email, every letter, every phone call making sure you take name of every person you speak to. Ask for every agreement in writing and make sure that you don't make a missed payment. Hope this helps.

c5ryl

Payplan does not charge anything and has been a fabulous with us. We can see our debt reducing and can access these details online....I would highly recommend them

dancingfairy

Why was there such a big discrepancy between what stepchange said you should offer and what you feel you can offer? Did you forget to tell StepChange about some of your expenses or did they disallow some of your expenses?
As it is an informal agreement between your creditors I would have thought you could have sorted something out via StepChange.
You can absolutely self-manage though.
Is the 60 a month the total of what you have available or do you mean on top of your regular monthly payments?
I would write to all your creditors and ask them for uptodate settlement figures as a starting point. You may find that you can settle with some of them. Sometimes you can settle by offering 30% of the debt as a full and final settlement. Obviously I don't know how many debts you have or how big/small each one is but this would be worth looking into.

df

sourcrates

Hi OP, many people have asked this question in the past, they have gone on DMP`s with fee charging companies because it seemed to offer a way out, at the time, but with hindsight you look at all those £60 per month fees and cringe, right ? the answer to your question is YES it is fairly simple to do this your self, think about it, all these people do is send and receive letters on your behalf, you can do exactly the same thing, takes a little time and effort, depends how many creditors you have, some companies don't like dealing with the debtor direct, some arnt bothered, are your debts still with original creditors or DCA`s or mixture of both ? DCA`s tend to deal best as if they own the debt they have probably bought it for peanuts so will be more willing to deal, as I said it just takes a bit of effort on your part but it certainly is something you can do yourself for free, or the cost of stamps anyway !! go for it :T

abbylou

Many thanks for all the advice and support, some interesting thoughts. Tonight dh and I will sit down and go through all our debts on the DMP. We will write down who it is with, contact details and write down as close as we can to the figure left. We also need to see which ones are still charging interest and which ones aren't.
Next step after that is to ring Debtline and find out if we have to give a period of notice. Then the plan is to start ringing round all the creditors and asking if they will accept us managing the plan ourselves - hopefully they will. The plan is to offer them all a slightly increased payment using the money we will have spare from the management fee.
Around January/February we will have more money available to put to the debt so we will then have to decide whether to increase the payments to all the creditors or pay monthly sums off some of them. Not sure about that yet.

sistafromanothermista

Good luck