Self Managed

KatieAnne · 3 September 2021 at 4:38PM

Firstly want to thank everyone that posts and all the advice offered on here, I have lurked over the years and tried to read up as much as possible. We have been in DMP with Stepchange for 4 years and have paid of £17k off origianl £72k ( 4 x Credit Cards and Next ).... I am approaching 55 next year so plan has always been to pay off / catch up with our Mortgage then, by cashing in a pension..... We have a Offset Mortgage...so all the years we were juggling with our credit card debt, with lots of stress we were offsetting our Mortgage to pay for everything else. Today I phoned up our Mortgage company to enquire how much we would need to pay a month to catch up, so that our Mortgage will be fully paid in 2030. We currently pay £1283 and need to pay £1632 per month. We currently pay Stepchange £407 per month.....if we were to pay £1632 mortgage .. we would need to reduce stepcharge to just £58, which is a huge decrease. I know that we should have been paying less the last few years but to be honest I was just so scared and anxious, it was a releif just to get the debt reduced. Our 4 Credit Cards are 2 x Tesco & 2 x MBNA.... they are all with PRA.... I phoned PRA today to enquire how much settlement they would offer, explaining that next year I may use my Pension to play catch up with our Mortgage or to clear some of our debt .... PRA said 2 x Tesco would not offer any settlement offer and MBNA would except 1k off £15k and £17k.. At the beginning of our DMP I requested CCA's and did not get anything back from Tesco ( Card taken out 1997) ... but the others were enforceable . I have logged onto Stepchange and updated Mortgage amount and I need to contact them to discuss. Is it best I go self managed, I am quite nervous about it all ? Will PRA accept the reduced offer ?