Mercedes Voluntary Surrender

[indianprincess]

Hi, Im new to this forum so please bear with me and please help if possible.

My partner has a PCP agreement with Mercedes. He bought the car from a MercDirect back in December 2007.

I dont have the full details with me as yet but wil update if needed by tomorrow.

So he bought the car and paid £500 deposit. I think the car was bought for £16000 and he made regular payments of £336 per month. Unfort we have had a few finanical problems recently and he feel behind in his payments. Hes in arrears of £840, he was called by Mercedes and told that he would be contacted by a debt collectors Anglia and he could pay the arrears with them and Merc will continue to take the normal direct debits as usual. So he was contacted at the end of December with a letter posted by hand that his mum forgot to give him till today !! Hes able to pay the remainder balance over 2 months.

So heres the dilema, because he didnt contact the debt collector he has now been asked to fill out a voluntary surrender form. We have about 10 months left on PCP and have paid well over the 50% value.

Also they state we owe 11k! Now we wanted out after the last PCP payment, we didnt want to keep the car. Plus its only valued for £7000.

I have no idea what to do. We need to have a few repairs done...amounts to about a 1K. And we dont want the car to be taken and charged Mercedes body work charges!

Please help, as I have no idea what to do.

[MARTIN3030]

Welcome to the site.

I am logging off now,but just wanted to say that you are in the right place,please bear with us until later today.

These issues are very familiar ones here and so I am sure you will get help.

[indianprincess]

Anyone?

[MARTIN3030]

I will move this to another forum.

[crem]

Sunday isn't always a very active day for posters so if you could be patient until Monday indianprincess there should be more people around to help you.

[indianprincess]

please can someone help

[heliosuk]

I think there are perhaps better people qualified to post a response than me on this issue Princess with experience of PCP plans. The bit that is not clear is as follows.

"Now we wanted out after the last PCP payment, we didnt want to keep the car. Plus its only valued for £7000."

Are you saying you want to terminate early based on the last payment you made or that you want to hand back the car at the end of the contract? If you are saying you want out of it now then perhaps you could be in trouble. However it might be cheaper to end the contract and take out a personal loan with a bank if that is possible. PCP is high risk stuff especially on cars that can depreciate so quickly. The arrears you have offered to clear very quickly so that is in your favour and I would do that if you can but not at the expense of other things that might affect your home life such as a mortgage or council tax. Mercedes are very very low in the pecking order if the family is experiencing tempoary difficulties.

The big thing is not to panic as you are over the 50% mark and they will need to go to court to enforce anything as I understand it. Make sure though that you have a good record of any damage and evidence of a date such as photos with a newspaper front page against it. This is because if you do back the car at least there is some evidence that people can give an opinion on as M/B finance are notorious for living in a fantasy land when it comes to determining normal wear and tear and other rectification costs on used cars. It wouldn't be so bad if the cars lived up to the reputation of being any good!!

The voluntary surrender form is what it says. If you want to do this then you can but I believe you might be letting yourself into the £4 grand difference at the moment. I think there are better ways of going about handling this.

Hopefully someone will add to this who actually understands PCP plans. The only thing I really understand about them is that they seemed a rip off from the time they started appearing!

[MARTIN3030]

We dont have much in archive on this subject but I found,

http://www.consumeractiongroup.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?136171-PCP-car-finance-how-to-exit

 

 

http://www.consumeractiongroup.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?159589-PCP-Finance-and-the-CCA

 

 

http://www.consumeractiongroup.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?71506-VT-on-PCP-agreement