Falling behind on credit cards

[broccoli_greens]

Hello,

 

This is a fantastic forum. I've spent hours reading last night and today.

 

I have seven credit cards totalling over £16k plus an overdraft of £650 and am self-employed. Due to lack of work lately, I'm one month in arrears on all of the cards and am not certain what to do next. I'm a private tenant with no savings. Although I've been making minimum repayments for months, I can no longer even meet those.

 

I have two options to bring my income back up to par with where it was: get more work (working on this) or get a job. There are vacancies available in my area for which I'm qualified and which would allow me to begin making repayments well over the minimum on the cards. Obviously there's a lead time associated with both options and due to a commercial lease, I prefer the first (defaulting on the lease might finish me depending on the landlord's leniency and keeping it while employed is madness).

 

My first step, I think, is a CCA request to all the cards - worth seeing if any weren't handled correctly on day one.

 

Will these requests cause me any problems with creditors bringing forward action of any kind? I have the letters ready to go based on the template on this forum.

 

Is there a specific department the CCA requests should go to in each creditor organisation? Registered office? Customer services?

 

I'm getting numerous phone calls to home, work and mobile every day from two creditors (HFC Marbles and Citi) but not answering them. I got a single text from Barclaycard telling me I am in arrears. Should I try to combine the "harassment letters" and CCA request letters into one for those who're being a pain or just ignore it for now (I've set up call blocking on my lines - no point being asked repeatedly for what I don't have)?

 

And finally, should I be sending token payments to each card to show that I'm not just ignoring the issue? Should I say anything about those at this stage in my letters? Maybe I should send a request to freeze interest and accept token payments until I increase income again right away rather than wait for the CCA requests to come back?

 

Lots of questions but I'm feeling much better having read a lot of the material here!

[geministar2007]

Hello and welcome to the site,

 

A cca request is your legal right, your creditors cant act differently with you.

 

Token payments are always a good idea as it shows willing, not that you wont pay you just cant.

Have you thought about putting together an income and expenditure form to send to your creditors? So they can see the difficulty you are in. They will usually require this if you are offering them a smaller amount.

 

Also there is no harm in asking creditors to freeze interest.

 

IGNORE phone calls only deal with creditors in writing. I did that for so long.

 

There are template letters on this site for various aspects, have a look in there and you may find some letters you can draft?

 

Try not to panic, you are aware you are in trouble and doing your best. Have you thought about calling National debt line they are very good at dealing with this sort of thing (also templates on there) they were the first port of call for me a year or so ago, i then went onto a debt management plan via Payplan in which they took over my finances and wrote to creditors on my behalf offering them token payments. They were very helpful.

 

No doubt someone else will be along with further advice.

 

Best of luck