www.iva.co.uk

Whilst we wait for our proposal to be put together step change have advised us to ring our creditors and pay what we can afford until the iva has been approved. I am concerned if we ge rejected we will be a worse position as we have 0% on several of our credit cards but we will lose this. What can you advise?

Paying a reduced amount, or none at all, will not affect the outcome of the proposal.

However I see your dilemma in the unlikely event that the proposal was refused. If you can afford to pay at the usual levels without getting into more debt, fair enough. But, looking at it from the creditors point of view you are saying to them that you can no longer afford the payments, yet still being able to do so.

In my experience while we was waiting for acceptance, we divided our surplus between the creditors.

Mine and my wife's plans were proposed for £100 each.

We both had 4 creditors so they got £25 each up until the iva started.

As foggy has already mentioned, creditors will wonder how your managing payments and still trying to secure an IVA.

I have been reading through this forum for a few years now and I can only recal one post about a refused proposal in that time.

Its been written many times that token payments make no impact on the likelyhood of approval. Better to put aside your surplus to make a small emergency kitty for use during the IVA.

Paul

My first contact with an IVA company was on the 21st of May and the creditors meeting was 27th of August.

During that time, I think pretty early on, I was advised to stop paying the creditors (or just pay token payment like £2 a month).

I did stop paying altogether and it scared me but by the time creditors were starting to get in touch, the IVA notifications had gone out so they all went quiet and I heard nothing more from them.

I had 0% deals too. I lost them and some interest got added, but not much in the grand scheme of things.

You are trying to enter an IVA and so you must be in financial trouble, just like most people here have been.

If you kept the 0% deals I would guess that it will just mean you survive financially a little longer till they expire.

Good luck, there's a wonderful community of helpful people and experts on here. Stay in touch

ps - if you stop payments and live on your wages you'll stop running up debts. Also you may be able to put a little aside for a "rainy day" during your IVA.

Hi, we started talking to Melanie Giles's office at the end of October 2012 and started the process of entering into IVA's and we stopped all creditor payments immediately. We were getting calls and letters constantly in the run up to our Creditors Meetings on 4th January 2013 and it was a very difficult time. Luckily our IVA's were approved and the calls/letters started dropping away but not having to make any payments for a couple of months was really helpful particularly as we had a water leak 2 weeks after the IVA's went through which cost £150 so we had the money for this! If, for any reason, your IVA is not approved, then you will obviously need to reconsider what to do but the bottom line is that you can't afford to sustain the current level of payments which is why you are considering an IVA so you shouldn't carry on trying to do this which is what we were doing - robbing Peter to pay Paul. By the end, we were making minimum payments on our credit cards and immediately spending the available credit (if there was any) so that we could live. It was awful and nearly two years into our IVA, our lives are so much better. Good luck with the IVA proposal, I'm sure you will get it through.

We didn't make payments to any creditors for the 4 months prior to the IVA being accepted by all creditors who voted - many of them who had the most money owing to them.

So it is better, in my opinion, to pay nothing.

We paid token payments and I wish we didn't bother.

I paid nothing and built up a little ( much needed) nest egg for emergencies.