To ask here about "payplan" debt management

[SunshineisSorry]

because i know its a popular section of the board

Apparently its not one of those dodgy debt management companies that end up getting you into even more shite than you are already in. Does anyone have any experience of them - apparently they are recommended by The National Debt line. We have various creditors at varying amounts and need to rationalise our payments as we are paying more than we can afford to companies who we owe less money to and less to ones we owe less to. We sort of want someone to act on our behalf and back us up legally rather than managing the debt. We have sort of been scraping through with all but getting nowhere and we want to try and clear the debts, its quite a lot, but we are up to date with our mortgage and clearing priority debts. It will all be so much easier once im working but im strugging to find a job (another thread) so really its a bit of time buying until i can get a job and start clearing them properly, now its a case of token payments really.

Payplan are excellent they work with the goverment. They are regulated and I would highly recommend them. You don't pay them any fees it's all free.

katvond, thankyou - i hope they can help us because we are running out of options, tether and our relationship is at breaking point :( All our own fault for not managing our finances properly but frustratingly not because we splashed out on loads of luxurys

We have experience and we are on a debt plan with them. The only problem we had was with MBNA who sought a charging order on the house, payplan couldn't prevent that. Feel free to PM me.

Payplan did everything from day 1, you get your own case officer who stays with you. The calls from your debtors stop. We pay £217 a month it all goes to the creditors. My DH owed £22k

I used to work for a credit union and Payplan and CAB were basically the only places we ever advised our clients to go who had debts they could not manage.

We used to see many people who had debt managemet plans with firms that charged fees and in the two years I was there I never saw anyone who had ever managed their way out of debt with any firm that charged a fee. The fees just ate up what little money they had and their debts never really reduced.

katvond - it is quite common to find unscured lenders getting courts to grant an attachment order to a property if a borrower does not keep up with payments on a loan. They can't force you to sell your house or have you repossessed. However, if you do sell your house they do have a right to take money you owe them out of any cash you have left over from the sale after you have paid off your mortgage.

Does it affect your credit rating if your do a debt management plan?

Don't kow about Payplan, but what a lovely response to a poster in trouble.Katvond,you are a very nice person unlike some very unhelpfull,judgie people on these boards recently. Mx.

Thanks morebeta

Yes it does affect your credit rating

I used to run credit references on our potential borrowers and can't remember any specific reference to debt management plans on a person's credit reference although the arrears to firms that were owed the money, usually catalogue firms, credit card firms and mobile phone companies and local authorities for council tax always showed up. Typically, someone with a debt management plan had already got a poor rating well before they went on the plan so going on one made no real difference.

CCCJs, DROs and bankruptcy always showed up.

We just wish we had know about payplan before, we signed up to another company "churchwood" we paid £400 I think to process it and got nothing, we then moved over to payplan and reported churchwood to the financial ombudsman and got our money back. We were very lucky. It was only by talking to CAB we knew of payplan.

Good advice and I'd also really recommend a forum called Consumer Action Group . The debt section has some excellent advisors and there are many free letter templates , for example, to send to creditors to stop harrassing phone calls.

www.consumeractiongroup.co.uk/forum/forumdisplay.php?167-Debt-Collection-Industry

I am interested in this scheme. I agree its lovely when posters come here and say it worked for us etc and not 'why are you in this situ'.

Thankyou to everyone who has posted, i feel much more confident about dealing with them now.

Not worried about credit rating, i can tell you that we will never EVER have another solitary thing on credit again. Our problems started when i had PND, my DP was self employed algthough not working for himself, he had to have loads of time off work to look after me and DD because i coudlnt cope. He lost his job and started working for himself. We ended up using credit cards to pay the mortgage and buy shopping etc. It just mounted up, we stuck our heads in the sand and it got worse and worse. We now have no safety net at all and have actually had to raid piggy banks to buy food .

I just wish i could get a job as that would make all the difference, ive no confidence left at all, despite having a doctorate, i'm unemployable :(

I am a debt counsellor and I deal with debt man companies on a regular basis. Pay plan are good and it's a free service. The downside is that they are very busy and you may need to wait a few weeks to get an allocated counsellor.

CCCS (the consumer credit counselling service) are also very good they are also free and are a charity. Their website is excellent and you will find alot of self help on there www.cccs.co.uk.
Any late payments to creditors will be registered on your credit file. A debt man plan will also be visible (in a form of a numerical score). Any info registered remains on your file and that of any joint financials associates for 6 years.

Some creditors do consider an attachment order on your property. However, they are expensive and only last for five years and they would only get money back if you sold your property during this timescale. As the property Market has slumped creditors are less likely to do this at present.

Sunshine - you have made a very important step in facing this debt and getting it under control and I hope that will help build your confidence and especially once your creditors stop hassling you. Your story is a very common one i used to see quite often. Perfectly responsible, good people facing illness, loss of a loved one, loss of a job, an accident, divorce, or any number of life traumas can easily slip into debt. There is no shame in that.

Would it help at all to just take any kind of job, even very low paid just to get out, meet people and rebuild your confidence?

MoreBeta, believe me, id do anything :) within reason

In regards to the attachment order, they will only go ahead if it is worth it to them. Put simply if it is a large amount owed and your repayments are small and look to be long term they will take the gamble on the equity in your property.

don't forget an attachment is not solely on selling the property, but any release of equity. Re mortgage and release funds they take their share first. Generally I'd be surprised to see a charging order on any individual debt of under 8k.

Finally the debtor can only attach if the debt and mortgage are in your name. If you had a 20k debt but the mortgage was in your dh's name they couldn't charge the property.

So hopefully this really isn't a issue you need to worry about

(Any secured debts would probably be charged as a matter of course though)

you know, we have a charging order on our house for 1.3k only and another company threatening one for £800 :(

Sunshine I think this is s common problem. The more I talk to people the more I see other struggling. You think it's only you, well we did anyway and we was so alone and ashamed to tell anyone, we still are. It's the recession that got us, work dried up for both of us as we are self employed and DH starting borrowing to keep his buisness afloat .

Sunshine .... sadly yes some bastards will go ahead regardless

technically... you should be ok on the £800. The sooner you get into a dmp the better.

At least they are small amounts so even if you failed payments a court wouldn't allow creditors to force sale. Are you maintaining the charging order repayments?

Lots of people use Payplan on debt sites.

For us, because we are so low income and rent from a HA and have no assets, we went for a different scheme only available in Scotland called Debt Arrangement Scheme, whereby we have quite low payments over a longer-term but it is a formal legal agreement and the creditors must freeze interest for the duration of the scheme, cancel any debt left over at the end and take no more legal action after they agree to it. But again, we have nothing to take and if they don't accept this we will go into the Scottish version of DRO, so it's likely they'll accept the offer (legally, they have 21 days to respond).

We looked at a DMP with CCCS, but the payments were too high for us to have any margin of error such as reduction in hours or put by for unexpected bills and it's imperative they freeze interest and stop contacting us, so we chose the other route.

Again, we didn't pay for it, it's done through our council's registered money adviser.

Like you, though, we will never, ever use credit for anything and just as well our credit is shot now. The minimum payments, however, were crippling us and we were getting nowhere on debt, plus, the interest rate is sure to rise.

YOu've done well to face up to this. The interest rate will most assuredly rise soon, try to see if the creditors will freeze the interest and fees for the duration of your plan.

Our charging order from MBNA was for £7k with court costs etc added! As if that wasn't enough. But now with this we pay £40 to them. We won't be selling we can't afford to.

We dribble money to the nationwide who went for the charging order - the frustrating thing about it, the majority of the debt owed to them was an overdraft which was made up of bank charges, so we are paying them for charging us - bastards. Once the charging order was made we contacted them to offer £30 a month, we were paying £50 on the CCJ and they said, oh pay what you can afford, when you can afford it as we have the CCJ now the debt is secure, im tempted to use the C word!

I USED CCCS THEY WERE BRILLIANT I WAS OUT OF WORK DUE TO ACCIDENT BUT THEY HELPED ME SORT IT OUT THEY EVEN INCLUDED ALLOWANCE FOR ESSENTIAL C;OTHES TE ONLY DEBTOR I HAD PROBLEMS WITH IS MBNA

Triedgranny MBNA are bastards the amount of people I've spoken to about them have said the same. On the Martin Lewis money forum I found out we were not the only ones getting charging orders from MBNA and the day we went to court MBNA were seeking 7 orders from other people.