Post
by
ggf » Thu Mar 31, 2011 7:57 pm
So, exactly 381 days ago I was sat with a debt of circa £80,000, a property in negative equity to the tune of a further £30,000 and a loan secured against it of £50,000. Desperate times indeed.
After years of prevarication and blind ignorance to the fact that something radical needed to be done, I started to research DMP's, IVA's and Bankruptcy. It was all a bit of minefield as you'll all know.
I listed out all my debts on a spreadsheet and the full severity of my situation was there to see in black and white. It was a shocking wake-up call.
I approached Payplan who came up with an 8-year DMP proposal (just for unsecured debts) of something like 87p in the £. Hardly an inspiring offer! I decided to enlist a private IP to look into my situation and found McCambridge Duffy (based in Derry, Northern Ireland) highly recommended on a number of debt advice forums.
After a month or two of sorting out the finer details, McCD were taking forward a 5 year 8-month IVA proposal to creditors at circa 43p in the £. This was accepted on March 16th 2010 and life suddenly became a lot better. This did obviously involve giving up my flat for repossession which was scary at first but my ownership had transferred back to the mortgage company, both the shortfall in equity and the secured loan became unsecured and therefore available to be put forward within the IVA proposal.
Thanks in particular to Michael Peoples and the team at McCD I was able to secure good monthly allowances for expenditure which, despite a pretty high IVA monthly repayment figure, left me with a good amount of money each month to carry on life as normal. It was a great outcome and I really felt i'd made a huge step in the right direction.
Just recently the company I work for started to offer voluntary redundancy packages as part of a major cost saving exercise. I talked to Michael Peoples about this and he suggested I could use this to my advantage in making a Full and Final settlement offer to creditors.
After crunching the numbers, I made an offer to creditors of circa 11p in the £. This was initially rejected but a subsequent offer equivalent to around 13p in the £ was today accepted. This means I will have paid back in total around £26,000 on an original debt of circa £160,000. An outstanding result!
The real point of this email is to advocate the services of McCambridge Duffy for anyone in a debt situation. From start to finish they have been ultra professional, have responded to my numerous queries in rapid time and have helped me through some very scary and desperate times.
I would like to use this forum to thank Michael Peoples, Judy Mooney, Roisin Duffy, Rosie Shott, Eunan Lynch and the eponymous Charco for all their help and support over the last year. Thanks to you guys my life has turned around completely and I can now face a significantly more prosperous future.
Words cannot express how grateful I am to all of you.
GB, Manchester
