Creditcards Unable to pay minimum monthly payment due COVID income reduced

callum9999

A good first step will be to call and tell them. All three providers (and most others I believe) are offering 3 month payment holidays to most customers affected by Covid.

Then as others have said, work with debt charities / make a budget etc and hopefully you'll be able to scrape together the minimums. I wouldn't write off being able to get a loan (even if you can only get a small one, it would help) - you should try and get some quotations from places like MSE Credit Club (they won't appear on your credit report).

Whatever you decide to do, absolutely don't just let them default.

eskbanker

femalemonarchfemalecanine said:

eskbanker said:

If you ran up £35K of debt while in full employment, that would suggest that your finances weren't sustainable before the crisis either, so you might benefit from stepping back and reviewing the situation in its entirety - it may be worth going over to the debt-free wannabe board and (a) reading up about how debt charities can help you, and (b) posting a Statement of Affairs via which to get constructive suggestions from other posters there.

Might suggest they had an extension on their house or a new kitchen. You've no idea why they have the debt

Were you perhaps under the impression that what the £35K was spent on makes a difference to anything (or that I was speculating about how OP got into debt)?

tlc678910

Hi OP,
Don't borrow money from your house to pay these cards.  This is "non secured" lending i.e. not secured against your house and as your finances are now in difficulty keeping the roof over your head safe is your number one priority.  If you have no realistic prospect to pay your cards for a while (no well paid job in the pipeline) then you should default on your cards - by either not paying them or paying a token amount.  Contacting them first to see if they can offer a payment break is an option although I believe interest will accrue during a break meaning that is you can't pay them afterwards you owe even more.  After a period of not paying your cards they will be defaulted and interest frozen.  You can then agree a monthly repayment in keeping with your budget rather than their minimum payment.  Visit the debt free wannabe section of this site.  They are the experts and will guide you every step of the way. 

To be honest you probably shouldn't have paid your cards this month.  The fact you know you can't pay them next month you should have kept the money to help you to manage to eat and pay your priority bills.