An IVA is a professional agreement between you and your unsecured creditors to pay back some of your debts over a defined time frame – normally five years, but it could be for a lesser period.
Secured creditors expect to obtain the complete contractual repayments on their secured loans to you over the lifetime of the IVA. Should you have a home loan, you’re going to be required to make the monthly home loan repayments to your home loan provider in full.
At the same time the unsecured lenders enjoy only a dividend on their unsecured loans to you. The size of the dividend can vary. It just depends on what you can afford to pay and whatever your unsecured creditors are prepared to consent to from you. Do not forget that over 75% of your unsecured lenders (calculated in £) will have to come to an agreement to embrace your IVA proposals before your IVA can be approved. In practice the dividend will most likely fall within the range of 20p in the £ to 40p in the £, even though of course it may be much smaller and indeed much greater. On occasion unsecured lenders may receive 100p in the £ and possibly get statutory interest on top of that.
Therefore if you offer your proposals for an IVA, your unsecured lenders are not required to accept your offer. In cases where they consider that you can make higher contributions than you offer at the start, then they can propose alterations to your IVA that could have the result of increasing the size of your monthly contributions or indeed they can seek to increase the duration of the IVA for potentially six months or a little more.
When you have a mortgaged property, unsecured lenders will not pay no attention to this point. They will consider the latest market valuation of the property and the amount you now owe to your mortgage supplier. You will be required to provide a current, genuine and fair market valuation of the property. You will also be required to obtain from your home loan company a present-day home loan redemption statement, detailing the complete cost of paying off your home loan, including any early redemption penalty which may be applicable. With the help of these two bits of information, your creditors can easily calculate if there is any realisable equity in the property. If there is realisable value therein, your unsecured creditors might possibly, through modification to your proposals, ask for you to re-mortgage your property during the course of the life of the IVA and introduce some or perhaps even more or less all of any released equity into your IVA for their benefit.
A well structured IVA proposal will already embody a provision for re-mortgaging the property and offering up equity to creditors. On the other hand, it may well be that re-mortgaging is not an option for you basically given that no mortgage provider will take you on owing to your weak credit reputation. Alternatively, you may learn that to re-mortgage the property, you could possibly have to pay high mortgage rates for the same reason.
Even if there is an absense of equity in the property, unsecured creditors might consider the magnitude of the monthly mortgage repayments. If they are high, lenders may propose a modification that you sell the property and move to lease accommodation, in this way permitting you to boost your monthly contributions to your IVA. As a yardstick, mortgage payments that exceed 40% of net family income would typically be presumed to be too much. Obviously if the expense of rental property is much lower than your monthly mortgage payments, then it is not outrageous that unsecured creditors would suggest such a modification.
In recent years, residence values have dropped sharply, and a lot of people find that their house is in negative equity. This simply just means that the cost of redemption of their mortgage is higher than the present market value of the home. If compelled to sell, the deficiency due to the mortgage provider now becomes a additional unsecured liability and so rates for dividend equally with the other unsecured creditors, as a consequence depressing the dividend in an IVA.
Don’t forget that your partner or spouse may have an equitable interest in your home. In many situations that interest is 50% of the equity. Your family may also have rights of residence in the property which could quite possibly make a forced sale difficult for lenders, at the very least. In summary then, an IVA can in truth have an effect on your mortgage but the good news is that in most situations, debtors will not ‘lose’ their house in an IVA.
If you are thinking of going into into an IVA and are anxious that it might affect your mortgage, you should initially seek the advice of an Insolvency Practitioner, alternatively known as an IP, for help and advice. A trustworthy IP will look at all of your financial situation. You really should incur no expenses in receiving this guidance. Your IP will go on to advise you on all of the choices open to you including entering into an Individual Voluntary Arrangement (IVA). That is not the only solution. You might consider entering into a Debt Management Plan (DMP) or even petitioning for your own Bankruptcy (BCY). There may be other possibilities available as well. You can opt for the best choice for yourself in the light of the advice provided by the IP.
Looking for reliable iva information? Get inside info on how and where to find the best now in our guide to all you need to know about Individual Voluntary Arrangements .