Is debt management right for you?

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Saturday, June 20th, 2009 Subscribe To Our Feed

If you’re in debt, you may be wondering whether debt management is right for you. The short answer is ‘It depends’: not just on how much you owe, but how much you earn and what you own. It also depends on how much you spend on your unsecured debts every month - and how much you can actually afford to spend on them.

Debt management may be a good idea for people who can’t afford to keep up with their monthly debt repayments, but can afford to pay something towards those debts.

So it won’t be the right solution for people who can afford to keep up with their payments as they stand - debt management involves negotiating with lenders, asking them to consider changes to the repayment plan that will help the borrower repay what they owe at a rate they can afford. If they can keep up with their debts in the way they originally agreed, their lenders will certainly expect them to do so.

And it won’t be the right solution for people who can’t pay anything towards their debts at all. If their essential expenses (mortgage/rent, food, utility bills, petrol, etc.) take up every penny of their income, they'll need to find a different method of tackling their debts, so they can plan their way out of debt. They may be able to remortgage, for example, or they may need to think about insolvency (bankruptcy, IVA (Individual Voluntary Arrangement) or DRO (Debt Relief Order)), as insolvency is there to help people who have no realistic chance of repaying what they owe in a reasonable period of time.

In other words, debt management can be suitable for people who can commit to making a regular contribution towards their debts - just not in the way they’d originally agreed.

Unlike an IVA, which is a legally binding agreement between a borrower and their lenders, a debt management plan is an informal agreement. Lenders aren’t obliged to agree to any changes in the way the debt will be repaid - and they’re not obliged to stick to any changes they have agreed.

However, if they can see that the debt management plan is working (i.e. that the borrower is maintaining the payments), they may have every incentive to keep on accepting repayments under the revised terms.

After all, in today's economic climate, many people are finding they simply can't keep up with their original repayment terms - whether it's because their income has dropped or because they're struggling to keep up with today's cost of living (or both) - so there's very little they can do other than offer reduced payments to their borrowers.

Given a choice, clients will frequently prefer to repay their debts as they originally agreed. Repaying any debt more slowly will obviously delay the day when they’re debt-free, and can add to the overall total they have to pay the lender. Why? The longer a debt exists, the longer it will gather interest. Even so, many lenders will agree to freeze interest on a debt when someone’s in a debt management plan (or at least reduce the rate they’re charging), and this can keep the total cost of the debt down.

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