DMP advice for newbie. Please help

ManyWays

1) Move joint bank account from Barclays to somebody that we don't owe anything to.
good suggestion

2) Send holding letters to all creditors.
Also good suggestion

3) We may be able to raise some capital, so explore full & final offers. I need to do some more research on this to see what lenders tend to accept. E.g. would a 45/50% offer be accepted (I'll go in offering less, but I think we may be able to raise about £18k0?
er raise from where? you aren't suggesting a remortgage are you?
My view is that this sort of offer is MUCH more likely to be acceptable a years or more after defaults and low monthly payments. With luck by that point quite a few of the debts will have been sold

4) If unsuccessful, go down the DMP route. Atm it would take about 14 years to clear, so we need to find a charity who would either be willing to do this for us for free or do it ourselves.
Try Payplan, they are not a charity but do fee-free DMPs. They are more pushy than Stepchange in suggesting IVAs, but let us know what they propose, as they will always fall back to a DMP. 

ManyWays

So far, we have no defaults but the Barclaycard will default once we miss the next payment, as this will be the 3rd missed payment.
Well it may not be as quick as that, but it will happen.
You have stopped paying all of the others?

In my experience, that level of settlement offer is very rarely accepted soon after you stop paying without strong medical evidence suggesting you are unlikely to work again for a very long time.

fatbelly

I think you need to play the long game on this. Start a dmp with low payments to get creditors into the mindset that getting their money back will take a long time.

Isthisforreal99

Think you need to be clear on who's debt it actually is......you say 'we' but the bulk of that looks like credit card debt and only one of you can be liable for it?

moogle87

Isthisforreal99 said:

Think you need to be clear on who's debt it actually is......you say 'we' but the bulk of that looks like credit card debt and only one of you can be liable for it?

In my name is just Virgin & PayPal. Everything else is in my husband's name.

moogle87

fatbelly said:

I think you need to play the long game on this. Start a dmp with low payments to get creditors into the mindset that getting their money back will take a long time.

I think the reasoning was that if we can settle at this point, it will avoid the defaults on our credit files, so it will be better in the long term.

moogle87

ManyWays said:

So far, we have no defaults but the Barclaycard will default once we miss the next payment, as this will be the 3rd missed payment.
Well it may not be as quick as that, but it will happen.
You have stopped paying all of the others?

In my experience, that level of settlement offer is very rarely accepted soon after you stop paying without strong medical evidence suggesting you are unlikely to work again for a very long time.

Yes, we've stopped making all payments at the moment.

moogle87

Grumpelstiltskin said:

OK Do not risk a bank account with First Direct,  you really need separate accounts, not a joint one and an account with no overdraft. Check before you open it that it doesn't have a connection with any of the banking groups you owe money to, as Gandalf pointed out it isn't sometimes obvious which are connected.

This is very helpful, than you. We didn't know this.
I'll move everything to NatWest. We used them in the past when we switched banks for the switching offers & I actually thought they had the best app, so that's an added bonus.

moogle87

Rob5342 said:

50% is a common sort of level that people are sometimes able to settle at. Normally settlement offers are reached with debt collectors after they have had the debt for a while original creditors aren't normally willing to settle.

How are you planning to raise the money? If you can raise it easily then a DMP may not be the right choice, if you have to borrow it from somewhere else then shifting debt around is a bad idea. 

My parents have offered to lend it to us & we will pay them back an amount that we can afford every month. Having said that, we will only borrow from them if we can avoid the DMP route. The point of the full & finals is to avoid the marks on our credit files that we will get when we default & then have to set up the DMP.

moogle87

ManyWays said:

1) Move joint bank account from Barclays to somebody that we don't owe anything to.
good suggestion

2) Send holding letters to all creditors.
Also good suggestion

3) We may be able to raise some capital, so explore full & final offers. I need to do some more research on this to see what lenders tend to accept. E.g. would a 45/50% offer be accepted (I'll go in offering less, but I think we may be able to raise about £18k0?
er raise from where? you aren't suggesting a remortgage are you?
My view is that this sort of offer is MUCH more likely to be acceptable a years or more after defaults and low monthly payments. With luck by that point quite a few of the debts will have been sold

4) If unsuccessful, go down the DMP route. Atm it would take about 14 years to clear, so we need to find a charity who would either be willing to do this for us for free or do it ourselves.
Try Payplan, they are not a charity but do fee-free DMPs. They are more pushy than Stepchange in suggesting IVAs, but let us know what they propose, as they will always fall back to a DMP. 

My parents said that they will lend us some money & we can then pay them back every month at a level that is affordable. 
No, we've agreed that borrowing on our mortgage is the absolute last resort.
So the money from my parents & I can sell a few pieces of jewellery (this is based on what I can get as a resale value, not what they are valued at for insurance purposes.)
But it would only get us to around the 45/50% mark (of what we owe), so if the lenders don't agree, we will have to go down the DMP route. Then we wouldn't borrow the money.
The purpose with the full & final offers is to avoid the DMP, so we can avoid the marks on our credit files.