F&F IVA help please

treading_water_2008

Hi everyone. Just wondering if anyone has any advice for me concerning my full and final IVA payment.

Through many changes in circumstances in 2009 we had to enter into an IVA (it seemed the best option at the time). We have been paying £360 a month to clear off our £25,000 debt and all has gone well until now. The IVA is due to finish in May this year (YAYYYY we are on the home straight), but unexpectedly my husband had received a large share bonus from his company.
So thinking we were doing the right thing we contacted our IVA company to ask how much we need to pay to end our IVA early. After reading many different posts about how much you should offer your creditors, we came to an amount of between £2,000-£3,000. If we were to allow the IVA to finish as normal we would still owe just over £2,000.
I have heard from our IVA company today and they wish to approach our creditors with an offer of £10,300!!!!!! I am really hoping that this is negotiable. I cannot believe that after putting our lives on hold for over 4 and a half years that we would still owe the original amount + lost interest + supervisor fees. AND will still have a bad credit rating to boot.
It just makes me wonder how being honest and upfront can slap you in the face and yet the fat cat banks still get to profit from someone else's misery.
Has anyone and advice/experience in this matter. Thank you.

National_Debtline

Hi tw

Welcome to the forum.

I'm assuming that the terms of the IVA agreement oblige you to fully disclose details of any windfalls/bonus/inheritance etc. received during the IVA (this is pretty much standard) so strictly speaking you would have been expected to relay this info to the IVA company either way.

Had your husband received this bonus, say, next year, it would have fallen outside the remit of the IVA, so the timing is unfortunate.

The amount they are asking for is large but not necessarily surprising - as you say, they are effectively looking to recoup the full debt AND the interest the creditors would otherwise have forgone. There are probably even some extra supervisor fees tacked on for the extra "work" done in negotiating this figure with the creditors.

The one positive I can try to offer is that in the event that you end up repaying the full debt in the IVA, you can add Notices of Correction to your respective credit files to highlight this. This would go some way towards mitigating the effect of the IVA on your creditworthiness, and it would help differentiate you from others who had done IVAs but written off large % of their debt in the process.

All in all tw, I'm not sure that you have a great deal of leverage in this negotiation but I would dearly love to be proved wrong. If anyone out there has been in a similar scenario to OP and fared better it would be very useful to hear from them.

Good luck

Regards

Dennis @NDL

treading_water_2008

Thanks for your advice Dennis, will ask about the notes of correction (though i'm gonna try and stay credit free from now on).