Very.co.uk account in arrears...

davy_cho

Hi there,
I'm looking for some advice really. My wife, through a combination of long term sickness and redundancy has let her Very.co.uk account fall into arrears badly. I only twigged on after seeing a letter that there'd been no payments made for 6 months on the outstanding debt. 

I tried to take control of the situation by offering to pay it back over time, but my first offer of monthly installments was too low. They referred us to StepChange. In the meantime I got a new job with a lot more money and tried again to set up a payment plan, but I'd missed a cut off date by a few days and they couldn't do anything about it. With the while Covid thing and her health not being great we have overshot the grace period given to get the StepChange agreement set up now too.

Basically, I want to know roughly what will happen if Very sell the debt on to someone else to collect. Would they potentially be easier to deal with and accept a payment plan from us or would it be a case of pay up or else?

Thanks

jazzyja

I can only talk from personal experience, probably about 8 years ago. I bought a laptop from very and just failed to keep up payments.  They were pretty much the same with me. I went to citizens advice who advised I let it be passed on to debt collection as very were being quite difficult and wouldn't accept an income and expenditure or my payment offers. It went to lowell eventually, who did accept what I offered. I say its so long ago simply because it may not work the same now but back then you were advised to let it be passed on, plus that was the only way interest  could be froze. It absolutely killed my credit rating of course as I had a default for 6 years but I did eventually pay it off. If you say you have better earnings could you not make lump sum payments? 

D3xt3r5L4b

Are you not able to settle it in full now?

adamp87

If you can’t settle it in full you’ve made fair attempts to make repayments. 

Most likely it’s going to be defaulted or has (especially if they pass onto a DCA) and at that point you could just say £1 a month.

Sounds like they are being difficult for no reason. 

davy_cho

Settlement in full is the only option or settle it through StepChange. Despite doing an earnings analysis with them and showing I could easily make repayments they said I'd missed the cut off for that to be an option for some reason. 

Got another 30 day extension there about 10 mins ago to sort out the StepChange thing, even though there's no need to go through them and it'll probably take longer to pay them off that way.

Was just worried about them selling the debt on really, I've no clue what happens in that scenario.

D3xt3r5L4b

You’d owe the debt to the company it’s been sold onto.