DMP & Mutual Support Thread - Part 11

January2015

milocat wrote: »

Hi everyone. Started my DMP earlier this month after many months of starting/failing/starting/failing have finally got it up and running. My monthly repayments have varied hugely between £116- £200 -£50. Currently I am on minimum payments, due to my shed roof caving in last month and destroying about 90% of the stuff that was stored in there. It never rains, it pours!

I don't plan to increase it any time soon, because at present I have no emergency fund. I'm hoping to save about £300 to begin with. I also need to repay my family and friends for what I've borrowed over the past 18 months. I owe my best friend nearly £700. Once they are paid off, and I have some savings, I can start overpaying here and there.

Does anyone know if you can ask for payments to go towards a specific creditor with SC? My lowest debt with them is something daft like £48 and I would quite like it gone. If I can't direct the payment to one creditor, what amount would I have to pay to make sure that it got paid off? I have 10 creditors.

Had a lovely moment the other day when I checked my statement, my largest debt is now £4995. So as much as its awful that I still owe loads of money, its nice that its coming down!

Well done to everyone else, keep plodding along! :beer:

SC will insist on treating creditors equally and therefore won't direct more of a share of your funds at one than any other.

However, if you have any spare cash there is nothing to stop you making additional payments directly to that one creditor. I did this with Very in order to avoid buy now pay later interest kicking in and increasing my debt. If you do this, just remember to update the debt total on your SC account online for that creditor each month.

I did this with Very for 8 months and updated the totals on my SC online account and SC never mentioned it to me at all

milocat

January2015 wrote: »

SC will insist on treating creditors equally and therefore won't direct more of a share of your funds at one than any other.

However, if you have any spare cash there is nothing to stop you making additional payments directly to that one creditor. I did this with Very in order to avoid buy now pay later interest kicking in and increasing my debt. If you do this, just remember to update the debt total on your SC account online for that creditor each month.

I did this with Very for 8 months and updated the totals on my SC online account and SC never mentioned it to me at all

Aaah amazing thank you! I didn't know you could make payments to creditors separately from the DMP. It's just a bit of a psychological boost to me, to be able to say I have fewer creditors at the end of the year, even if its only a small amount off the overall total. I think when you're on a DMP sometimes its the little things you do that keep you going. Specifically with my DFD being in 2035!! Maybe I could sort of snowball the debts on the side as well? Or will that mess with them and void it? This is all highly confusing :rotfl:

Triangle

Hi all

I haven't posted in a while so I thought it was time for a quick update. I do read lots, just feel I have nothing useful to contribute. It's fair to say though that this thread was and continues to be a real life line

We are now three months into our DMP. Of our four debts one has defaulted :j (my c/c) and the other three (joint loan, husband's c/c and my store card) are listed as simply 'late payment'. I haven't had any letter contact for ages and no telephone calls whatsoever since starting!

I have a few changes to my budget to do next year (child tax credit ending, one lot of nursery charges ending) so I've decided I will wait until September when things should be more settled to focus on getting defaults for all of them. At some point in the the future we hope to move house (although the mortgage will be our only debt once this has all finished - without a doubt!) so the default thing is fairly important but of course paying everything back much more so.

I had a fair bit in my emergency fund - unfortunately this week my car had its MOT and it needed A LOT of work This has wiped out the fund but I am actually so happy - this is the first time ever we had money put aside for things like this, if it would have been this time last year we would have just whacked it on my credit card without a second thought. So I'm actually really proud of myself I have no doubt that this DMP will be life changing for us and our attitudes to money.

Sorry for the long post! Hope everyone is doing OK.

Tx

January2015

milocat wrote: »

Aaah amazing thank you! I didn't know you could make payments to creditors separately from the DMP. It's just a bit of a psychological boost to me, to be able to say I have fewer creditors at the end of the year, even if its only a small amount off the overall total. I think when you're on a DMP sometimes its the little things you do that keep you going. Specifically with my DFD being in 2035!! Maybe I could sort of snowball the debts on the side as well? Or will that mess with them and void it? This is all highly confusing :rotfl:

If you get the interest stopped (and the majority of creditors do stop the interest) then you would be better banking any funds you can, rather than snowball. Once you have a reasonable amount set aside you could start offer full and final settlements to creditors of your choice.

You are supposed to treat creditors equally and if you have funds you should offer them equally across the creditors based on the balance of each debt. However, in the real world if you had a lump sum - let's dream and pretend you had £5k saved. If you offered that across all your creditors it wouldn't be enough for a full and final and therefore they would just reduce the outstanding balances accordingly. If you had one debt of £15k and it has been transferred to a debt collection agency - you could say a family friend has offered to help you out and you have £5k to settle the debt in full (letter templates on this forum somewhere). They may (but may not) accept your offer. If you start a bit lower than you really have you will have room for manouevre. If you are successful you will have just cleared a £15k debt for £5k. Much better than snowballing

milocat

January2015 wrote: »

If you get the interest stopped (and the majority of creditors do stop the interest) then you would be better banking any funds you can, rather than snowball. Once you have a reasonable amount set aside you could start offer full and final settlements to creditors of your choice.

You are supposed to treat creditors equally and if you have funds you should offer them equally across the creditors based on the balance of each debt. However, in the real world if you had a lump sum - let's dream and pretend you had £5k saved. If you offered that across all your creditors it wouldn't be enough for a full and final and therefore they would just reduce the outstanding balances accordingly. If you had one debt of £15k and it has been transferred to a debt collection agency - you could say a family friend has offered to help you out and you have £5k to settle the debt in full (letter templates on this forum somewhere). They may (but may not) accept your offer. If you start a bit lower than you really have you will have room for manouevre. If you are successful you will have just cleared a £15k debt for £5k. Much better than snowballing

Oooh you lovely people. You know so much more than me about this stuff! F&F would you say on average if I had a debt of £1.5k and offered them £900 it would be accepted by a collections agency? Interest is frozen on 9 out of 10 of my debts. I may or may not have a little bit of money spare by the end of the month, so this is all highly useful sorry if am coming across as a bit of ditz - nobody around IRL to explain this sort of thing to me!

January2015

milocat wrote: »

Oooh you lovely people. You know so much more than me about this stuff! F&F would you say on average if I had a debt of £1.5k and offered them £900 it would be accepted by a collections agency? Interest is frozen on 9 out of 10 of my debts. I may or may not have a little bit of money spare by the end of the month, so this is all highly useful sorry if am coming across as a bit of ditz - nobody around IRL to explain this sort of thing to me!

I, unfortunately, have not yet reached anywhere near the point of being able to offer full and final settlements (F&Fs) - but others will be along to give you advice.

From what I have read on these forums though it would depend how long the debt has been with a DCA. £900 on a £1.5k debt is approx 60% and that does seem to have been very achievable by others. However, the advice I have seen is to go in with a lower offer - some start as low as 30% of the debt (I recently read one case where they offered just under 17% of the debts and this was accepted by the majority of creditors but I think there were extreme circumstances taken into consideration, i.e. the debtor was seriously considering bankruptcy if the offers were not accepted as the length of existing DMP arrangements was ridiculously long).

As I say - wait for more advice, or perhaps when you are in a position to make an offer post a new thread on the main forum asking for specific advice

Good luck with it though :beer:

fermi

In case people hadn't seen it, there are some very useful DMP guide and links from debtcamel site (a CAB advisor).

See: http://debtcamel.co.uk/debt-options/guide-to-dmps/

sourcrates

milocat wrote: »

Oooh you lovely people. You know so much more than me about this stuff! F&F would you say on average if I had a debt of £1.5k and offered them £900 it would be accepted by a collections agency? Interest is frozen on 9 out of 10 of my debts. I may or may not have a little bit of money spare by the end of the month, so this is all highly useful sorry if am coming across as a bit of ditz - nobody around IRL to explain this sort of thing to me!

Its anyone guess unfortunately, and depends on so many factors.


As January says, start low, don't show all your cards at once, usually the longer a debt collection agency has held the account, the more keen they will be to do a deal.

You need to "persuade them" that the deal your offering represents the best return for them, you can mention that you are considering Bankruptcy (even if you arnt) tends to focus there minds a bit.

Its all a matter of negotiation.


Good Luck, and Merry Christmas !!

MrsSammyB

Evening all, I'm having a bit of a time of it ��

My hubby is self employed and looking at no work for (at least) 2 weeks over Xmas, I knew this would be the case and made it clear to SC that this would happen especially at Christmas (one of the reasons we ended up in a pickle at times - as well as the obvious!). We pay quite a lot to our DMP every month, £1350 ish, so I've called them, after taking advice from this thread, and they've reduced the DMP by £800 for Jan 1st - they were lovely understanding and jobs a good'un.

Since speaking to them, I've been in a 7 car pile up on a motorway that I was lucky to walk away from and the car is sadly a total write off. I can and am claiming from the person who hit me (I was car 4 in the 7 cars and my car was smashed front and back), but the car I hit is claiming from me and my excess is circa £250. I've been signed off work since the crash and only get SSP and its now looking very likely I'm not going to be able to pay the DMP payment at all, let alone the reduced payment!

Merry Xmas to me! (I am a very positive person and know that I'm very lucky to have not been injured too badly and I'm pleased this is the most of my worries!)

I know I need to call and speak to them, but has anyone had experience of not being able to make a payment at all? What is the best thing to do? xx

sourcrates

Hi,

To coin a phrase, !!!! happens, if you can't pay, don't pay, DMP an informal agreement, remove yourself from it if you must, look after no 1, forget your creditors for now, look after yourself, have a merry Christmas, restart in the new year, when your able there will be no comebacks, good luck !!