Northern Rock, to be honest, were not too bad. We left our house in April last year, we have not paid any mortgage or secured loan since January 2007. We did not hand the keys in, we just left it to be repossessed, we were advised by CAB that if we gave it up, we may not get on the council house waiting list.
The house was only repossessed by Nrock a couple of weeks, ago, I don’t know why on earth they have taken so long, but there you go. Up until the end, they were very keen for us to pay and keep the house. I kept explaining that we could not afford the mortgage and the secured loan. If we did not have the Picture loan, we could have kept the house, it was our huge mistake for taking it on.
We tried to sell the house initially, we had a buyer who was ready to exchange contracts but it was Picture who would not allow a sale unless we paid them £10,000. We did not have this money. The man I spoke to on the phone from Picture was horrible and just told me “well, we will not allow you to sell your house then”
We looked into an IVA, the company we approached convinced us that they could get Picture to release this 2nd charge and allow the sale and then any shortfall,(about £16,000) would have gone into the IVA. Picture took 5 long months to decide NO, we could still not sell the house. The estate agent/solicitor we had also tried to convince Picture to allow the sale, to no avail. We had moved out by then, had not paid any creditors for 5 months (on advice from the IVA company)
The pressure just got too much so we decided on bankruptcy, we had no choice, we could not do the IVA as the house was stuck in stalemate and mentally, I could take no more.
Bankruptcy has been tough, there have been things I have not been happy about, some of the things the OR has said to us, etc and now they are trying for an IPA when our surplus is about £20 per month, so there always seems to be some on-going hassle and stress to contend with, but hopefully it will be sorted soon, but I don’t regret it at all, for that fresh start.
