Court papers received

**laura**

Hi all. Please help as I'm worried sick here. Hubs lost his job over a month ago and we have taken advise from step change re our debts. Long story short we are making £1 token payments and all creditors have accepted. One of these however is a gambling website that he owes £9k to! They haven't responded to our step change letter and have today sent county court papers. I'm terrified. Even if he admits the amount and asks for time to pay it says they can ask the court to file judgement for that amount. We can't pay £9k in one go! Is there anyway we can come out of this without a CCJ??
Also - it's says we have 14 days but on the front it says date of service 16th June and the papers are dated the 11th? There's no way we will be able to get documents to them by Tuesday?!

sourcrates

Hi,

Relax, a court will not make you pay anything you can not afford.

You should acknowledge service online, this gives you an extra 14 days, so 28 in total.

When a creditor starts court action, you'll get a number of documents from the court. These are a claim form and a response pack.

The claim form gives details of how much your creditor is claiming you owe them. The response pack contains a number of forms. Some of the forms are for you to say whether you accept you owe the money. If you don't agree you owe the money, there's also a form you need to send back to confirm you got the documents.

It's very important not to ignore these documents. You should read the notes which come with the response pack carefully and deal with the documents by the deadline given. If you don't deal with these documents, a court order can be made against you. If this happens, you'll have to pay back all the money your creditor is claiming, even if you don't owe it. You may also have to pay interest and extra costs on top of this.

The response pack contains the following forms:

an admission form to use if you accept you do owe the money
a defence form to use if you want to say you don't owe the money
an acknowledgment of service to use to confirm that you got the documents. You only need to send this form back if you don't agree you owe the money.
You must do one of the following within 14 days of the particulars of claim being sent:

return the defence form to the court together with the acknowledgment of service
return the acknowledgment of service only, if you need extra time to fill in the defence form. This will give you an extra 14 days to return the defence form, but you must do this within 28 days of the particulars of claim being sent
return the admission form to your creditor
return both the admission and defence form to the court if you accept you owe some of the money being claimed but not all of it.

You may want to contact your creditor to try and reach an agreement about paying back the debt without going to court. This might be cheaper for you. If you do this, you will still need to meet the 14 day deadline for sending back the court documents, unless you can get your creditor to extend the deadline. If your creditor does agree to extend the deadline, make sure you get this in writing and let the court know.

You can use the admission form to ask to pay off the debt in installments. You can say how much you want to pay in each installment and when you want to pay them. It's always best to offer something. A small offer, even as low as £1, is better than offering nothing at all.

**laura**

Thank you for replying. We agree he owes the money. The fool!

The claim for and response pack have been sent together, is that normal?
Please can you tell me what you mean by acknowledging online?

sourcrates

**laura** wrote: »

Thank you for replying. We agree he owes the money. The fool!

The claim for and response pack have been sent together, is that normal?
Please can you tell me what you mean by acknowledging online?

Yes, quiet normal, i believe you can respond via the moneyclaim website :


https://www.moneyclaim.gov.uk/web/mcol/welcome

**laura**

Thank you again. We have already sent a step change budget & letter and made the offer of £1 (which we have paid) and now have received this. We haven't heard from them at all since we sent the SC info though x

sourcrates

**laura** wrote: »

Thank you again. We have already sent a step change budget & letter and made the offer of £1 (which we have paid) and now have received this. We haven't heard from them at all since we sent the SC info though x

You may not be able to avoid a CCJ on this, but as long as you have filled in, and returned, all relevant forms, any judgement that is handed down, should be affordable for you, as long as you have made the court aware of your current financial situation, they will not impose a sum greater than you can afford.

It sounds scary, but in reality, you just continue to pay what you can afford, both you and the creditor are bound by the judgement, so all should carry on as normal.

**laura**

Thank you.

Does a CCJ affect anything other than your ability to obtain credit in the future?

Marktheshark

Do you own property or any large value assets and how much is owed to everyone in total ?
You might be a candidate for Bankruptcy which is nowhere hear as bad as it sounds.
It is more a punishment for irresponsible and bad lenders that the bankrupt applicant.

sourcrates

**laura** wrote: »

Thank you.

Does a CCJ affect anything other than your ability to obtain credit in the future?

No, normally not, depends on your work i suppose, i had one years ago for mortgage arrears, stays on your file for 6 years, then drops off, satisfied or not.

Marktheshark

**laura** wrote: »

Thank you.

Does a CCJ affect anything other than your ability to obtain credit in the future?

Will having no credit be a bad thing if he is addicted to gambling ?
No disrespect intended, but generally, gamblers, ...gamble, its an addiction and an addiction is something that they can not stop doing.

**laura**

Yes we own 2 properties and my husband is on my mums mortgage too. Total owed and shown on step change list of creditors £84k however this does include around £15k of interest on a large HSBC loan as they took the o/s total rather than the settlement figure.

How would bankruptcy or an IVA affect the properties. More specifically my mums as she has equity which we don't in either of ours (one is most likely in negative equity the other will have very minimal equity) mums has approx £50k though none is ours - hubs was named purely to get the mortgage passed through x