There are some advantages to consolidating your debts into one consolidation loan. Even the word ‘consolidation’ is reassuring for many people. It invokes the idea of reducing a lot of little and some not so little problems into one single manageable problem.
(more…)Debt Management Plans (DMPs) are much in the news these days. Some negative aspects of the industry made the biggest headlines. Like any industry a few bad apples can give the barrel a bad name. In the UK the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) has already taken steps to deal with the bad apples. The most serious offences it has identified occurred in the areas of marketing and charging practices. In September 2010 it issued a warning to 129 debt management companies and followed that up with high profile enforcement action against the worst offenders.
(more…)A challenge to Ireland’s arcane insolvency regulations may perhaps be made to the High Court within just a few months, as per a newly released report in The Sunday Independent by Maeve Sheehan.
(more…)If you have money worries and feel that you may be insolvent, you might like to learn about an Individual Voluntary Arrangement (IVA) and how an IVA could make life better for you. Remember that having money worries in itself is not sufficient to qualify you for an IVA. You must in fact be insolvent.
(more…)It offered to hit the ground running and the new Irish Government will in the near future be a hundred days in office. It is fully commited to execute a great deal of transitions and that being said maybe right now is the time to ask numerous basic questions as to exactly what it is providing in support of the ordinary citizen as distinct from what it is doing in relation to bankers, builders, NAMA and sovereign interest rates in its undoubtedly difficult efforts to meet its committed EU and IMF performance goals.
(more…)Many people today have personal money worries. Most people want to do something about them, ideally to make them go away. There are various solutions to issues of personal insolvency out there. The problem is when and where to begin. We would like to know how serious our problems are and rate our situation on a scale of one to ten. A rating of one would be a state of being affluent and comfortable with ten being in a state of ‘hopeless’ personal insolvency. Except of course that there is always hope!
(more…)When confronted with severe credit card debt situations it’s easy to ignore the consequences of non-payment or late settlement on creditors. The lender is frequently viewed as the big bad wolf and not worthy of any sympathy from the beleaguered person in debt.
(more…)All through the real-estate boom which preceded the current recession men and women in britain started to dip their toes in the property market in the expectation of increasing equity over a period of five to ten years in the hope and expectation that this probably would let them have a really good yield on their funds.
(more…)The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) in September 2008 published Debt Management Guidance OFT366 in which it addressed the issue of creditors refusing to enter into negotiations with Debt Management Companies (DMC). This is what the OFT had to say in this publication:
(more…)A good Individual Voluntary Arrangement (IVA) proposal will have at its heart a sensible, realistic and well constructed Income and Expenditure Statement (I&E). A concern for anyone who is contemplating entering an IVA is whether creditors will look for the last penny of disposable income to be contributed, leaving nothing for emergencies or for ‘rainy day’ events.
(more…)It seems that Northern Ireland leads the way when compared to other regions of the UK in the level of personal debt problems encountered by its citizens, according to a report issued by a national debt charity, the Consumer Credit Counselling Service (CCCS).
(more…)An Individual Voluntary Arrangement (IVA) is a formal agreement between an insolvent debtor and his or her unsecured creditors to repay a portion of the unsecured debts over a limited period of time. The duration is usually five years, but it can be for a shorter or occasionally a somewhat longer period.
(more…)There are some companies which target people in up and running IVAs and try to persuade them that they should have gone bankrupt in the first place and that it is not too late to do so. These companies often get their list of potential clients from the IVA register and contact them by mail-shot. They may even imply that the original advice (to offer an IVA to creditors) was the wrong advice and debtors are told that the IVA may have been ‘missold’ to them. The OFT has issued warnings to some of these companies which promote bankruptcy to debtors who are already in IVAs and may charge large fees for their services if the debtor decides to use them.
(more…)For anybody who proposes an Individual Voluntary Arrangement (IVA) to their creditors, it’s an occasion of great satisfaction and sometimes unbridled joy when the day of the Meeting of Creditors (MOC) comes round and they learn that their IVA has been approved by creditors. They can now look forward to being debt free in a reasonable period of time. No more debt collectors, no more threatening or harassing phone calls from creditors, no more bills, invoices or statements of account and no more threats of legal action. Visits from bailiffs are a thing of the past.
(more…)Wanting to blame somebody else for our own financial problems is an entirely predictable and human reaction, particularly in the current recession. There has been a huge growth in personal indebtedness in the last ten years, particularly mortgage debt and credit card debt.
(more…)Three parties have a keen interest in how your Individual Voluntary Arrangement (IVA) is going, once it is up and running following acceptance of your proposals by your creditors.
(more…)Most Individual Voluntary Arrangements last for 60 months (5 years) as standard, and in this time the debtor will make fixed payments each month. The IVA proposal sets out what the debtor’s offer of repayment to creditors is. If the debtors disposable income increases during the term of the IVA the creditors will expect to see the debtors monthly payments to them also increase.
(more…)Many of us have personal money worries and want to do something about them. We know that there are solutions out there. The problem we have is that while we know that we need to do something, we don’t know where to begin and so many of us do nothing. We may not even know the extent of our problems or whether we are insolvent.
(more…)Many successful claims have been made against creditors in relation to Payment Protection Insurance (PPI), where the borrower has been miss-sold a PPI policy and many such borrowers have received compensation from the offending creditors. In the context of a borrower entering into an Individual Voluntary Arrangement (IVA) where one or more lenders provided PPI in the past, the debtor may make a claim for compensation against any creditor who miss-sold such a policy.
(more…)Many students who expect to graduate this year will have debts of £25,000 or more to dampen their enthusiasm as they seek to enter a less than buoyant jobs market. Surveys have found that half of those graduating expect that it will take ten years for them to repay their student debts while one in ten think it could take twenty years. With tuition fees inexorably increasing year on year, average student debt could rise to as much as £80,000.
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