Some advice on a DMP

josephine82

The problem with anxiety is that you overthink detail and can convince yourself about something happening that is perhaps not realistic. 

I don’t know if you have any strategies in place to cope with the anxiety but often advice is to use evidence to ground you and stop that overthinking and worrying. 

The advice given here to everyone who posts in debt is that CCJs are rarely given. The advice is being given by people with significant understanding of the debt landscape and they wouldn’t tell you this if it wasn’t true.  

Your anxious brain is trying to trick you! 

Trust the advice you are getting here and take it one step at a time. Take action to improve your current situation, sort out that budget, the defaults and your emergency fund and then re-assess. 

Worth looking back here through old posts and reading some of the success stories from people in similar situations; especially those who have managed to negotiate reduced settlements down the road even with huge debts. 

It will be okay. Everything is fixable. Nobody can take what you can’t afford. 

Rob5342

If they do go for a CCJ then it's all done online or by post, and the court will set payments at what you can afford. Why are you worried about having to make payments that.you can afford?

If the original creditor doesn't like what you are paying then they will normally just sell it on for a fraction of its value. If you completely ignore the debt then they might go for a CCJ eventually, but if they've got your paymenta rolling in for no effort there's not much incentive for them to put time and money into getting a ccj that would probably only result in the same payments anyway. 

tigergambit

DeterminedtoChange86 said:

Thanks, I’m not sure anyone can’t talk me down at the moment. I’m completely gone.

Even the prospect of a CCJ further into the process is just making me absolutely sick with anxiety. It would feel brutal to think you were getting somewhere to be dealt a hammer blow like that.

I can totally relate to this, but in my experience inaction feeds anxiety. Why don't you start by getting your SOA together and posting it up so that the experts on here can take a better look at your options?

Four years ago I had 60k of unsecured debt but with the help of full &final settlements I have this down to 18k and under control. DCAs will settle lower level debts for reasonable amounts but you need to be organised, save hard and have a strategy. 

Getting yourself organised and some helpful advice will work wonders with the anxiety too. 

DeterminedtoChange86

Hi, I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who posted on here. I’m mentally feeling much better and after long and really good discussions with my wife we’ve worked out that our situation is not as bad as I first feared. We have about £800 - £1000  income available to us to pay into the debt with the finances pooled (my wife earns a very good salary and has zero debt). So we are going to just budget tighter and really focus on paying it down. We’ve worked out this can probably be done in about 4.5 years and still leave us with a good quality of life, with a small emergency fund also building. we might miss out on big holidays and other things but in the grand scheme of things this will be done and dusted before my kids are in secondary school.

I guess I just wanted to post this as I’d posted some concerning things about my mental health and I didn’t want to go silent. Also, speak to your partners, my wife was shocked but it felt so much better to talk about it. I felt like a burden for so long, but she’s made me feel like a normal human who’s made some bad decisions. She’s been my absolute rock. 

And again, thanks for everyone’s messages, without weighing up all the options I’d have never addressed the root cause of my issues and started planning to solve them. 

RAS

Delighted to hear from you. Wishing you both every success. Remember MSE is here if you want more information. That might include a lot of things other than debt. And you can read the debt diaries for inspiration.

fatbelly

Maybe start a thread on the diaries section? Could be very therapeutic.