have a look at www.beatmydebt.co.uk there are some guidelines on there I believe, but what you need to focus on is what YOU spend as that's what's important
Your income and expenditure should be based on actuals and not on recommended guidelines....please use your actual costs to form this as this will then give the best chance of a successful IVA.
Sharing from experiences of dealing with debt
There is a solution for everyone .... Just need to stay positive !
Be very careful when you complete your I&E that you actually understand what you spend as you may very well not do so.
I say this from personal experience after I decided to go down the IVA route and put down something like £250 a month for food/shopping for a family of four as it seemed to make in my mind a figure that looked good to creditors and that's what I thought I spent.
I was told (very politely i should add) that that figure was a joke and was pushed to £550+
Only after when I really started to understand my finances that they were right and I was delusional in what I thought I spent.
End result = succesful 5 year IVA.
Moral of story, yes there are guidelines but you need to really understand what you are spending as I'll bet it's more than you think and getting it right at day one is very important to a succesful conclusion.
Last edited by herbekj on Thu Nov 22, 2012 6:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Last Payment - November 2011 - Completion Certificate received 2 weeks after last payment, Removed from Insolvency Register within 4 weeks after last payment.
I still think it's worthwhile looking at the guidelines, quite often when you're in debt you cut back so hard that you vastly underestimate what you spend, so it's worthwhile checking that against what the guidelines expect you to spend, also the guidelines invariably show some items that you don't immediately realise that you should be budgeting for, how often to we get people struggling because they hadn't realised they could claim an allowance for meals at work and childrens pocket money etc? I would never advocate anyone trying to claim for something they don't spend on, however it's good to look at the guidelines to prompt you into looking realistically at your budget to make sure you are covering everything, most good IP's will point these things out to you but we all know there are some that don't.
...and there you have it - the full monty, item one on the search - free to download as a pdf. Cannot find 2012 guide (don't even know if there is one).
Hope this helps you all out. Gives us all a good idea of what is considered reasonable - benchmark and 'top line'. A handy reference at review time.
My opinions are just that: Based on my experience and being a self-employed IVA customer.
Those guidelines should only be applied once a client has declared their own specific expenditure. They are fairly rigorously used by creditors, but if there are any specific arears which exceed the guidelines for good reason, and these are properly justified, creditors are usually pretty amenable to accepting them.
