Debt relief order advice please

[sausageinmypocket]

Hello,

I'm thinking of getting a debt relief order for old debts, but I'm unsure if it's the best thing to do and I was hoping to get some advice here before I try and make any big decisions (plus making a long phone call to StepChange etc isn't easy with toddlers hanging off my legs!)

I have some old debt, mostly racked up when I was a young student and knew sweet bugger all about money. I'm currently paying a small token to different collection agencies but I can't see an end in sight and the chance to have a clean slate is very tempting.

I'm married and a sahm. My 'income' is CTC and CB. CTC goes in to our joint account along with my husbands wages and CB goes in to mine. Our income is low. All debts in total are under the 20k limit, and none are joint debts. We have a car but it's in my DHs name. We rent from a HA and have no rent arrears or overdrafts.

What I would like to know is if my potential DRO would negatively impact on my husband due to us having a joint account, and whether it would completely screw us over with getting a mortgage in the future. We are in no position to buy any time soon but in 6yrs + we will hopefully be on our way to purchasing our home.

TIA

Have a look here

Also the forum for expert advice and help getting your budget in place for the DRO application (people short of money are often used to spending less than what is a sustainable amount on groceries etc so often underestimate what they need to spend):

forums.moneysavingexpert.com/forumdisplay.php?f=159

You probably want to change the joint account arrangement as it would impact your DH, but it might do anyway due to the six year history - ie your joint account will stay on his file for 6 years and that might associate him to you (although I'm not 100% sure about this).

Does he need to get credit? If he already has a credit card, he can keep it as long as he keeps it up to date.

The DRO will drop off your file 6 years after it has ended, which seems to be a year after it starts, and then you will need to rebuild your credit rating from scratch so it could be getting on for 10 years before you qualify for a mortgage, but you don't currently know if/when you will be in that position, so you probably shouldn't factor a possible future mortgage into whether you should get a DRO or not. More about getting yourself sorted financially, especially if you aren't getting anywhere with the debts at the moment.

Thank you, that's really helpful. I'll have a look at those links later on once the children are in bed. My outgoings are definitely lower than the recommended, I can do a weeks food shop for around £60 for 5 of us! So hopefully there will be a bit of wiggle room there.

I'm gutted that I didn't start this whole process 5 years ago when I first spoke to StepChange to try and manage the debts, I would have been way further down the road to credit recovery whereas now I'm 31 and it's still looming over me.