A Smooth Step Change

SpaceCadet12

Hello all,

Been on my Step Change for 6 months.  I have made my payments. Ie had one debt transferred and not too many letters.   I am hoping this is it, for the next 4.5 years, I just make my payments and my credtiors are happy see i am being consistent in payments and life plods along.  

Is this the case? I feel like I am waiting for some hammer to drop or something to happen. 

Do some balances end quicker than others then payments move to other companies to increase their payments? 

Thanks to anyone who can share their experiences x

gwynlas

Yes it just plods along but yu might get the odd letter from a creditor who is not in line wwith your annual review, just remind them that it is all under the umbrellas of stepchange.

Smaller debts are generally completed sooner and payment reallocated

Rob5342

For most people it goes very smoothly and it all just keeps going until they are paid off. 

Unfortunately Stepchange seem to have rushed you in to starting a Dmp, you should really have stopped paying and waited for defaults before starting the dmp as its much better for your credit record in the long term. If there are some debts that haven't defaulted then you might want to consider stopping payments to them to speed the defaults up.

Another tactic you might want to employ is to pay less than you can afford and save the difference to use for settlement offers at some point in the future. 

Once the debts have been sold on and have been with debt purchasers for a while you could also make cca requests for them, if the cca can't be produced then the debt is enenforcesble and you can simply stop paying it. 

ManyWays

Stepchange doesnt make payments that are proportionate to the balance owing, it uses a more complicated formula described here https://www.stepchange.org/creditor-payments.aspx. As a result, it is normal for some debts to be cleared in a Stepchange DMP before others, then Stepchange reapportions the monthly payment to a cleared debt between the remaining debts. 

Rob5342

Thank you for posting that link, I've removed the incorrect information I put in my post. 

I think the most important thing to note is that Stepchange act to treat your creditors what they call fairly, but if you manage it yourself you can do a number of things that make things vastly better for you.