Reducing Creditor Harassment
If you are not able to pay your financial obligations as they fall due or have fallen behind in your repayments to loan providers then you might already have begun to endure creditor harassment. It quite often begins with receiving harmless looking reminder letters delivered in your post after which it escalates to delivery of slightly more aggressive letters, with large bold lettering of the phrase ‘OVERDUE’ normally coloured red.
If you are still unable to make the repayments demanded creditors might ramp up their chasing to sending you e-mail messages or text messages and if this doesn’t have the desired impact, they may set out to phone you on your home landline, on your mobile phone perhaps even at your place of work. The ultimate stage of chasing may include personal visits to your home or even to your workplace or both. Creditors sometimes contract out the more unsavoury parts of the hounding to debt collection firms.
Does pestering get the job done?
It must do given that people in the UK are deluged with telephone calls and email messages regularly by lenders or agents working on their behalf chasing up settlement of debt. If it didn’t succeed surely lenders would give up flogging the dead horse and employ alternative strategies for promoting repayment. Individuals do react to the lenders who shout longest, loudest and most often. Thus creditors will not stop these pestering actions anytime soon. Consumers are not likely to be spared the panic and tension resulting from these kinds of measures.
Is there anything you can do?
Naturally, you can stop the harassment by fully repaying your debts and keeping up with payments as they fall due into the future. Let’s say you can’t achieve that? For many people it is just not an option. You may even be insolvent at the present time and you may never be capable of paying off all your obligations. Will that indicate that you are definitely going to serve a life sentence of lender pestering? No, you’re not. There is a remedy – rather there are several viable remedies. Each one of these remedies provides some decrease in the level of lender harassment and some remedies may stop harassment completely.
Provided you are definitely insolvent you can enter into an Individual Voluntary Arrangement (IVA) or petition for your own Bankruptcy. They are two personal insolvency processes that shield you from your lenders and that enjoy the complete weight of the law behind them. Even if you are not insolvent, you can go into a Debt Management Plan with your creditors. You can do this by yourself by getting agreement with every one of your creditors as to how you will pay back your debts to them. This is at times termed as a self administered Debt Management Plan.
Most Debt Management Plans however are administered with the aid of firms that are experts in putting together Debt Management Plans between consumers and their lenders and then administering these plans over a period of years. Whilst lender pestering will often decline when you enter a Debt Management Plan, it might not cease completely. This is because lenders aren’t obliged legally to agree to the Debt Management Plan proposals.
Not the case in an IVA or Bankruptcy. Once your IVA has been authorised or the Bankruptcy Order granted, creditors must desist from pursuing the person in debt and must deal with the Supervisor of the IVA or the Trustee in Bankruptcy in regards to settlement of the liabilities. Creditor action in chasing liabilities may carry on for six to eight weeks from the date of approval of the IVA or from the date of the Bankruptcy order. This is primarily because big banks, credit houses and other loan providers are frequently ineffective at informing their different divisions regarding the IVA or the Bankruptcy and the creditor’s debt collection section could be the last to hear of an accepted IVA or of a Bankruptcy order.