Hi,
Please excuse the life story...
I've been trying - unsuccessfully - to balance my debts for the better part of 4 years and am somewhat bitter about the banks' complete lack of interest in helping me get out of it (for instance I've been told TWICE by Barclays, once by Abbey and once by MBNA that they won't help me consolidate ALL my debts into one manageable payment, but will go halfway if I take out a credit card with them at 20% interest rate and start stuffing the groceries on that!)
It's finally reached the point where the total value's exceeding £40k and I'm sick to death of trying to do the impossible when as soon as it looks like we might be balancing it off, something else happens.
I live in a rented house with a wife and three children (two at school and one starting in September), it's a bit shabby with lots needing doing to it, and the landlord would make Rigsby look like an altruist, but it's the cheapest house I can get that isn't stuck in a war-torn inner city ghetto. We've been shafted by two other landlords in the past 5 years, leaving us out of pocket, so are now operating on the basis that if we don't rock the boat, maybe we won't get cornholed a third time.
In trying to keep our head above water, we've sold all our assets besides the essentials; the only "luxury" items we still have are a couple of second hand TVs, a couple of second-hand computers, and a printer.
My wife's at university, so she uses a laptop that's almost 4 years old paid for out of her loan; my eldest son has a 7 year old donated PC for homework, and I have a computer that's 5 years old and which I bought second-hand. Even with the monitors they're not worth much more than £50 each.
I work away from home a lot on public sector contracts so it's not unusual for me to clock up £300 worth of fuel and dinner expenses in a month, but my basic pay's less then £25k a year gross (£1400 a month net) and by the time you take rent, council tax and groceries out of that (£1000) there's barely enough to cover my legitimate expenses let alone the £100s of debt repayments.
My employer's good at repaying my expenses promptly but they are still carried over to the next calendar month.
I'm in a real quandary as to which direction to take.
Bankruptcy's possibly the best option on the basis that I can't possibly afford to pay back more than a fraction of what I owe, but it would probably affect my job (which involves security clearance for some clients, but not all). I also don't want the house cleared out of the few remaining assets we have left either, because we do actually need them and they aren't worth squat (our main TV cost £18 second hand, for example).
IVA's looking like the best option but I have absolutely no idea what the timescales are like in applying for one. I read something here to the effect that it'll take months? What do I do in the meantime?
Assuming I've got all the paperwork straight, how long am I going to have people knocking on the door before the scheme's put in place, and if it involves bank accounts and credit cards being closed off completely, how would I do a job which involves using a company car, staying in hotels and paying for my own food and fuel?
Thanks ever so much for your assistance.
