How To Get Creditors Off Your Back

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.

If you are actually insolvent you can enter into an Individual Voluntary Arrangement or you can petition for personal Bankruptcy. These insolvency processes protect you from your creditors as they are legally binding. Even if you are not insolvent, you can enter a Debt Management Plan with your creditors. You can arrange this yourself by reaching an agreement with each of the creditors that you owe the money too.

This is known as a self administered debt management plan. Most debt management plans are administered with the assistance of specialist companies qualified in setting up DMPs between consumers and creditors. While creditor harassment will usually calm down when you enter a DMP, it doesnt mean it will disappear altogether. This is because creditors are not bound by law to accept the DMP proposals and it is not legally binding like an iva is.

This is not the case in an IVA or bankruptcy. Once the IVA has been approved or the bankruptcy Order granted, creditors must stop chasing the debtor for payment and must deal with the Supervisor of the IVA or the Trustee in Bankruptcy in seeking repayment of the debts owed. Creditor activity in chasing debts will often continue for 6 weeks or more from the date of the iva or bankruptcy approval. This is 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 department to hear about the iva or bankruptcy so they will still chase you until then.

Learn more about debt help and debt relief by visiting National Debt Relief.