disillusioned

[Shining]

I think that timeframe is unacceptable in my humble opinion and would be feeling frustrated in respect of moving on. some companies unfortunately, don't have the excellent customer service skills they claim to have the outset of the IVA

[newdidit]

I am with debt free direct and equity in finance are dealing with the ppi claims I have heard nothing from debt free direct for the past year and I ring equity in finance to keep on top of it

[MelanieGiles]

You should still be receiving annual reports from your IP which ought to be providing you with details of the progress being made with the PPI claims at least.

[Alimay]

Apologies if I am resurrecting an old thread but I totally empathise with the OP and wanted to share some of my frustrations.
We went into an IVA due to job losses and finding out that what was originally manageable to repay had become completely unmanageable and we were in over our heads. We looked at an IVA and with great reluctance accepted to go onto one.
2 months after signing our IVA contract, both my husband and myself found better paying jobs and we could now afford all our debts at good repayment amounts and if we had not accepted the IVA we would have paid off most of them by now including interest. At the time, we did not realise that we could fail the IVA and return to agreements with our creditors - how I wish we had done this.
Going from an IVA where we were due to pay less than 50p in the pound over 5 years, we are now looking at paying 100p in the pound plus all costs and finishing up this year - approx 3.5 years.
Yesterday we received a financial statement of payments and receipts. Our receipts are not correct as per our bank statements - we keep a running total on an Excel sheet according to our bank statements. We have received £3400 in PPI refunds plus a few pennies - not reflected on the statement. Last year we had an confirmed claim from BT which we disputed as my husband paid a settlement amount to BT 2 years prior to our IVA (we have to go to an old bank to get statements to prove this) but now the BT claim has disappeared from agreed claims and another creditor has appeared, I assume this is BT again - but the amount is almost triple but not agreed. What the hell is going on I would love to know.
I requested a 21 day notice to be sent out to 2 creditors that had not put in a claim - last year - and was told that a claim had been received but on my statement of accounts it still shows as not received.
According to the statement we have 12.5 months left to pay, according to my calculation of fees (over 30% of my debt) we have at most 4.5 months left to pay to settle all creditors 100% as well as all IP costs.
If you take away the unagreed/unclaimed debts, we would have overpaid by £3000 plus a bit.
We spoke to our firm last year who also told us that we had approximately 16 months left to pay give a few months either way. This was before the PPI monies of £3400 were taken into account and tally's with my calculations.
We took a 2 month agreed payment holiday due to my husband's company changing their payment terms (he receives money weekly) from weekly to 28 days from date of invoice but if the money is due on a Monday - Thursday it only gets paid on the Friday which we receive on the following Tuesday.
Our IP has sent a report to our creditors claiming that we are in arrears and he is in communication with us to collect these arrears - total BS. Nothing has been said to us and no contact has been made.
We were told that the Nominee would get a once of payment of £1000.00 but on our latest statement it states that £1000 has been paid but a further £1000 is due - don't understand this at all.

All in all we have done our level best to co-operate with our IP and have communicated with them constantly but it appears that for us, an IVA was completely the wrong choice. We have compiled an email including our spreadsheet of calculations to our IP and can only hope that it is all sorted out to everyone's satisfaction as I do believe he is unaware of the errors having had the report calculated by his staff and hence the reason I am not naming him.

I am not saying that it is wrong for everybody. If you are not going to be able to repay your debts within 5 years and all costs, then an IVA is definitely the way to go. For us unfortunately it was the wrong choice.

When we took out the IVA we were told that the creditors pay the costs, this is not true as we are paying 100% of all costs as to date we have paid more than our debt and in effect are just paying costs.

I believe in an honest day's wage for an honest day's work and have no problem paying my IP as he has done the work, but I would have preferred to have been told that costs = approx. 30% of your payments or debts (in our case debts) and not the 15% that you pay out of each payment.

I believe that there is always 2 sides to a story and what works for me will not necessarily work for the next person.

[Michael Peoples]

It is a shame that your experience has been so disappointing as IVAs can be an excellent for people to restart. However the IP firms need to do their part and if you are finding errors in something like the receipts and payments account it does not look good to anyone considering contacting an IP.

You are entitled to meet with your IP to discuss your concerns and this may the best thing to do. Take your spread sheet and their reports and ask for a total breakdown of everything as we are talking about substantial sums of money here and it needs to be done correctly.

[lem]

Sorry, but I don't understand how you can say you did not know that you could fail your iva and go back to paying your creditors directly, or you did not know this or that, we are at the same stage as you in our IVA and we spent 6 months from our first phone call to getting our IVA agreed in the beginning researching and researching, getting advice, opinions and asking tons of questions so that we were fully prepared and armed with all the information, good and bad so we knew what we were getting into.

I really do honestly feel that it is YOUR responsibility to look into debt solutions properly, dont take things at face value and do your research.

I do think it is totally unfair on IVA companies for people to turn round 3 or 4 years down the line and blame them for something you did not realise or know or that is blatantly noted in your proposal.

We didnt just ask questions of our IP in the beginning, now we have the world wide web, there really is no excuse for people to not find out all the information about what an IVA means before they rush headlong into signing their lives away for 5 or 6 years

[MelanieGiles]

If the main beef here is costs - it is important to remember that the IP's costs are integral to the IVA proposal and subsequent modifications - and have to be agreed with the client in advance. I cannot therefore see how there can be any nasty suprises - and of course with a 100p in the £ case, the trade-off is costs vs interest which would continue to be payable.

[Alimay]

Hi all - thanks for your replies

Michael - My husband and I sent a long email (wanted everything in writing) which was replied to by a case worker with our IP copied in. The case worker has not addressed all our concerns and we will be emailing him back as he has acknowledged half stories and not the whole story. He has stated a few things which are not in any way true and we are going to keep replying to him until we get everything corrected. One thing he did acknowledge was the in the coming months we would achieve 100p in the pound and they will then see how many more months we have left to pay after that as he is not taking into account all the PPI as he claims it was received after the review date - I have proof that 2 of the PPI amounts were received well before the review date. He also acknowledges that our nominee only gets a one off payment but does not acknowledge that what is written on the annual report to creditors shows that an additional amount is due to be paid in the next financial year. He has also stated that our agreed monthly amount is £1100, our financial report states £1037.82 and the amount agreed with them at our annual review is £1000.00 (our original amount was £208 per month) - I am sure you can appreciate why we are frustrated with them. All in all, we will persevere as we are so close to the end.

Lem - My understanding of an IVA was that it is a court order which protects you as well as expects you to pay back at a rate per month agreed by your creditors and your IP according to your ability to pay. Once we signed the contract as far as I read it, we would be in breach of contract and court order if we failed it. Apologies if my understanding of the law is not that great. I do however mention that I believe that IVA's are right for some but not all and not everybody has a full understanding of the law. When we went into the IVA we did not expect to land such well paying jobs and therefore the subject of whether or not you could fail your IVA never came up or entered our heads. We accepted and entered our IVA in good faith and we will complete it in good faith being in the lucky position to repay our creditors all that we owe as we always wanted to repay them not get off our debts.

Melanie - I have no beef with paying for a service such as our IP has provided but I do believe that being told that you don't have to worry about costs as creditors pay the costs is misleading. As I state in my post, "honest days wage for an honest days work". I dont begrudge my IP his money at all - he earned it, he must be paid.

All I was saying is that an IVA is not right for everybody. If I had my time over, I would probably not gone for the IVA as it turned out to not be the right situation but as the saying goes - hindsight is the best sight.

I hope I have clarified what I was trying to convey.

[Michael Peoples]

I do hope that you get to the bottom of this because there do appear to be inconsistencies. Given the amount of money involved your IP has a duty to give a full explanation of what money has been paid and where it has gone. Ultimately you are paying the wages of the IP to provide a service and you are entitled to raise the queries.

[welshwiz]

I agree with Alimay iva is not suitable for everybody and yes hindsight is a very good thing, personally if I had everything explained in full I would have thought a lot harder before entering IVA, we never once spoke to IP only every dealt with case worker and can honestly say it was only after finding the forum and posting some issues on here that we got the replies we needed. We are jus t at the stage of completion with F&F and personally can't wait to get this all done and dusty. The only good thing about the IVA it has taught us to budget better and to think what might happen and not assume everything will carry on the same, all our debt was manageable until hubby lost job.

[country girl]

I think IVAs are great if you do not own your own home or have little equity but if you do have a reasonable of equity it becomes much more complicated. I thought entering an IVA would protect my home but it does not seem to be the case and this certainly was not make clear to me. I was just told if I cannot re-mortgage than the IVA would just carry on for 12 months but it has not been as simple a that.

After paying for 5 years and working hard to be able to make increased payments I still don't know what is going to happen about my home. Yes I do have equity but it is not something I can access without selling my home.

[Alimay]

Update:

As Michael suggested, we persevered with our queries and eventually our email was given to a supervisor - Louise. She went as far as to listen to recorded telephone calls and read our concerns and answered them all!

She fully understood why we were querying the review. I think the more she investigated the more she found that we were right and their service had been shocking. Still no word from our IP who has been copied in on the emails - perhaps he is too embarressed to make contact.

She agreed that the annual review which was sent out to the creditors and ourselves was incorrect. There was 1 debt that was on last year's review as agreed which did not show on this years accounts and which has been confirmed to us is not agreed, and 1 debt that appeared twice as the debt had been sold off to another company which showed as a 'new' debt and the old debt also showed. In short a complete shambles of an annual review last year as well as this year.

I asked her for an up to date payments and receipts on our account and this is what she came back with "I write in reference to my conversation with Mrs xxxx yesterday regarding the estimated final contribution date. I can confirm that to achieve 100p/£ you are required to make a payment of £1,265.54. I have attached a copy of the figures for your perusal.

BUT this is the best part, because of when she pulled our figures, we had made a further payment of £1300.00 which would only be received by them today as it was a bacs payment and would not have shown up on her figures so it appears that we have made our final payment already. Fingers crossed.

Unfortunately because of an overpayment of dividend to one of my creditors, it may take a while to get the money back from them to distribute to our creditors. If my IP had sorted out a problem when I brought it to his attention over a year ago, the overpayment would never have happened! This is a long story but involved a ppi payment which was awarded to us in 2012 but the offset and reduced claim letter was never chased up. 2 years of me phoning and emailing, finally to get this sorted out.

If we had accepted the annual review at face value and not checked it, according to them we had a further £12000 to pay over the next year.

So advice to all, check your annual financial review of receipts and payments.

[Foggy]

Don't get too excited over having made the last payment. 100p/£ is the debt .. there are still fees to cover. But, of course, you have still save 5 years worth of interest.

[Alimay]

Hi Foggy, fees were also taken into account in her calculations. Total debt plus fees equal amount that we have paid to date. I will hear from her tomorrow (she is off today) and unless there are more fees than what she calculated, we should be free and clear.

We also have confirmation that statutory interest is not included even if we pay 100p/£ so all that could be left is fees that she is not aware of.

[Foggy]

Excellent, Alimay