If you are unable to pay your debts as they fall due or have fallen behind in your payments to creditors then you can understand what harassment by creditors is.
It often starts with reminder letters and overdue letters and if you are unable to make the repayments they require the chasing is ramped up to emails, texts, phone calls and even personal visits to your home or to your place of work or both. Creditors often contract out the more unsavoury parts of the hounding to debt collection agencies.
Does harassment work?
It must do since consumers in the UK are bombarded with phone calls and emails every day by creditors or agents acting on their behalf chasing up repayment of debt. If it didn’t work surely creditors would stop flogging the dead horse and use other means of promoting repayment. So creditors are not going to stop these actions anytime soon. The worry and stress caused or compounded by creditor harassment will continue.
Is there anything the consumer can do?
Clearly, you can stop the harassment by paying off your debts and maintain payments as they fall due into the future. What if you can’t do that? For many people it is simply not an option. You may even be insolvent now and you may never be able to pay off all your debts.
Does that mean you are destined to serve a life sentence of creditor harassment?
No, you are not. There is a solution. Rather there are several possible solutions. They all come down to the same thing. The level of creditor harassment will reduce in each of these solutions and cease altogether in some of them.
Provided you are truly insolvent you can enter into an Individual Voluntary Arrangement (IVA) or petition for your own Bankruptcy (BKY). These are two personal insolvency processes that protect you from your creditors and that have the full weight of the law behind them. Even if you are not insolvent, you can enter a Debt Management Plan (DMP) with your creditors. You can do this yourself by reaching agreement with each of your creditors as to how you will repay your debts to them. This is sometimes called a self administered Debt Management Plan. Most Debt Management Plans however are administered with the assistance of companies which specialize in setting up Debt Management Plans between consumers and their creditors and then administering these plans over a period of years. While creditor harassment will usually diminish when you enter a Debt Management Plan, it will not disappear altogether. This is because creditors are not bound by law to accept the Debt Management Plan proposals.
Not so in an IVA or BKY. Once the IVA has been approved or the BKY Order granted, creditors must desist from chasing the debtor and must deal with the Supervisor of the IVA or the Trustee in BKY in seeking repayment of the debts. Creditor activity in chasing debts may continue for six to eight weeks from the date of approval of the IVA or from the date of the BKY order. This is mainly because large banks, credit houses and other lenders are not terribly efficient at communicating the matter to their various departments. The debt collection department may be the last to hear of or approved IVA or of a BKY order.