Sorry Various Questions

dimp81

Please can anyone help x I am filing in bankruptcy forms, what do you say how long you were in difficulty? Also my wife only contributes to pY for the water and telephones charges, is this ok? It's causing lots of disagreements at the moment and she is not willing to pay anymore as she has a lot of outgoings?

TheGardener

hi - domestic harmony is so often at risk when there is debt. So the OR will look at all family income and would usually make the judgement that you and you wife pay a proportionate amount of the household costs. for example; if you earn 30% more than your wife, you would pay 30% more of the domestic outgoings. If you earn the same, then you pay 50% each. If you have slid into unmanageable debt because your wife is not contributing enough - that's an issue you will both have to address.

How long - well, its for as long as you have been struggling - was there a key point where it started to go wrong like illness or redundancy? If not then just say however long it has been since your debts were more than you could pay. On my form I put 5 years because I know I had been struggling at least that long. There is no right or wrong answer - its whatever you feel is about right.

longtermplanner

Don't worry too much about the 'how long' question. If you haven't been making the minimum payments to your debts for say 2 years, then 2 years is an obvious choice.

You aren't going to get quizzed about this after you have gone bankrupt. "I realise now that my spending in 2009 was stupid but at the time I thought I was going to be able to earn more fairly quickly" might seem lame to you in retrospect, but it could well have been what you were thinking at the time.

re your wife's payments. Do you mean she has debts of her own? Or is she on quite a low wage and needs to run a car to get to work and she pays for all the kids clothes etc? TheGardener is right about what the OR will expect to be the 'usual' split', but perhaps you could give some more details, because it is always open to you to make out a case why the usual split is not applicable to you.