www.iva.co.uk

My wife has had to leave her job due to illness. She is not coping at work or at home and things are pretty bad at the moment. We currently pay £249 to our joint Iva and we have 21 months left. A friend has offered us the some of 4000 to put forward as a full and final offer. Does this sound like a realistic offer?
My wife desperately needs to concentrate on her health and with her not working or being fit to look after the children we are pretty stuck

Hi,

Sorry to hear of your wife's health problems and hope she gets better soon.

It's not a joint IVA but 'interlocking' so you do need to speak to your IP and explain the problems and ask if you can put a full and final agreement forward.

I too am sorry to hear of the problems but your offer seems more than fair. Speak to your IP and they should be able to sanction a suspension of payments pending the variation for the full and final offer.

Do you have equity in your home ? This might be a question your IP asks when you speak to them.

Hi there - does the 21 months left include any potential 12 month extension for your equity? Has your wifes income reduced as a result of her illness? If so you could argue that her contributions should be reduced accordingly which would also help to being the figure down. £4k on offer of £5.3k is fairly reasonable and I would hope your IP would support this offer when calling the creditors variation meeting.

We don't have a mortgage we currently rent. Due to my job (forces) I cannot take time off to look after the children while my wife recovers and so we need to keep them with the childminder they were with when she was at work. My wife's wages only covered the childcare costs before, but now she's has had to leave due to her breakdown we cannot afford to carry on paying the childminder on my wage alone.
Feeling pretty stuck at the moment, my dad has been paying the childminder for us since my wife had to leave her job but I know he cannot afford to carry on

That is awful - I hope she recovers soon. Perhaps you could ask to see if contributions to date could be taken as a full and final and close the IVA down?

Hi you really should speak to your IP. Either the contributions should be reduced due to the reduction in income, the IVA should be varied to accept payments to date in F&F or lastly try to reach a f&f settlement with creditors. Don't tell your IP about that last option though until you have explored the other two first -keep that up your sleeves.

Called creditfix today and asked to speak to our IP. This seemed such a big ask and was told I could not speak to our case worker. She advised that our friends need to write a letter to offer the full and final, but does anyone have any suggestions of what they should put in the letter?

With CF you have no hope and bob hope speaking to the IP.

You also have little hope of speaking to the same person twice so put everything in writing and is as plain english as possible.

Your friend just needs to state that he/she will advance the sum of £4,000 as full and final settlement of your IVAs. These funds are offered only for this purpose and will not be available if creditors reject the offer.

I would suggest you try to get the IVA closed down with payments made to date rather than getting in debt even if with a friend. Creditors are sympathetic especially where a debtor is a member of the Armed Forces so they agree to close it down anyway.

Our case worker said it was not likely that they would as they would be be losing money. She said we had to try and make an offer as close to the £5.2k that's left of the IVA, but to be honest I'm not asking our friends for more money.
I think I may call them back and demand to speak to my ip- I never realised it would be so difficult to get hold of her.
When we were with Melanie Giles we never had any problems speaking to her at all.

Does anyone know how long it takes to call a creditors meeting

I'm pretty sure it should be within 28 days.

In the R3 standard terms and conditions which we adhere to the IP must call a meeting within 21 days of being asked by the debtor. I think Protocol is the same but it may be 28 as Kallis says. Regardless the IP must call the meeting whether they want to or not so ask for a full and final meeting to be summoned.

Creditors can only say no and rarely do.

Thankyou all for your help