Debt Advice: How To Deal With Debt
If you’re unable to keep repaying your debt at its current level, then the best thing to do is to get in touch with a company that offers free debt advice. One of the options they will probably tell you about are debt management plans.
What Are Debt Management Plans?
Sometimes titles are difficult because they are too specific and it just sounds like jargon. In this case though the title has the opposite problem, it is too general and sounds like it could refer to a number of differing things. In this case however, a debt management plan refers to an informal way of arranging your making reduced payments to your creditors.
Due to the fact that this sort of arrangement is completely informal, it means that your creditors are under no obligation to accept it. They can also bring it to an end at any time. They usually don’t though, unless you start to miss payments.
What you do if you want to make use of a debt management plan is get in touch with a company that offers debt advice. They should be able to negotiate with your creditors, so that you only have to pay as much as you can afford. And usually they’ll accept as if they don’t, and they take legal action instead, that’s probably what they’ll have to accept anyway.
The type of debt that is being discussed here is only unsecured debt. Although there is nothing to stop you trying to get lenders of secured loans to enter in to a plan of this sort as well, they have less reason to do so as if you stop paying them they can simply take possession of your home.
With lenders of unsecured loans it is different. It could end up that they are allowed to take some of your possessions, or even get a charging order put on your house which in effect makes it in to a secured loan. However that is only after they have gone to the courts and you don’t pay what the court lays down.
Alternative Debt Solutions
There are a number of different ways that you can deal with a debt problem of course, a debt management plan being just one of them. When you get in touch with a company for debt advice, they will be able to tell you about a number of other ones as well.
If you can’t get all of your creditors to agree to receiving reduced payments, then an IVA may be appropriate. In that case only 75% of them have to agree. And then after 5 years, what you haven’t been able to pay will be written off by your creditors.
If you are in a particularly bad situation, in which you are unable to make any reasonable payments then declaring yourself bankrupt might be the only option. However, this has a number of disadvantages so should be avoided if at all possible.
One of the main problems with bankruptcy is that all of your assets will be at risk. Many of them will probably be sold in order to pay off as much of your debt as possible. Also, it is expensive as it costs over 700 in England and Wales to go bankrupt. On top of that, your job may be affected and you will go on the insolvency register.
If you cannot afford to make payments on your unsecured debt anymore and you don’t own your own home, then one of the best pieces of debt advice is to apply for a debt relief order. With one of these, your debt is immediately frozen and you don’t have to make any more payments on it for a year. If you still can’t afford to make payments after a year, it is written off altogether.
Harvey Campbell is an authority in all different financial matters. He very much enjoys writing regularly at http://www.debtadvice.net which is where you can discover more regarding Debt Advice.
October 8, 2011
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Posted by Nathan Anderson
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