Hello Poorboy and welcome.

It sounds as though your creditors believe you can afford to pay more. If you go along with that, and then your circumstances change for the better, I think it's quite likely your monthly trust deed payment will be amended accordingly.

Hi Poorboy

As TDA says, if you have offered an extra £200pm, and then you have more disposable income later. the Trustee can ask for that in addition to what you are paying. Having said that, your trust deed firm did your original income & expenditure, and at that point came up with a figure they thought reasonable -i.e. £200 less than you are now actually paying. Do you know if your payments were meant to increase when your car was paid off? If not, why don't you try going back to your TD firm, and tell them you were desparate for the TD to become protected, and can struggle for the next 6 months until the car is paid off, but not for 3 years. Can they be flexible when the car finishes, to take you back to the position they had agreed with you originally? Worth a try.

TDA & Shona

Thanks for your advice.

If our circumstances changed for the better, i.e. no more car finance or one of us get a pay rise, then the monhtly payments to the creditors would rise. But what if after that our circumstances became worse, say one of us was made redundant or we had a baby, would the payment drop back down to the original, or be completely reassessed, or balanced out to make the agreed total payable at the commencement of the PTD?

Hi Poorboy.

If there is a detrimental change to your circumstances that was outside of your control the payment may be reduced at the discretion of your Trustee.

Where such a change resulted from circumstances that were under your control it's more likely that an extension would be applied along with any reduction so that creditors did not lose out.

Any payment should be based on your actual circumstances at the time.

Hi Poorboy

I agree with TDA. If your circumstances change through no fault of your own, you should not be penalised. A Trust Deed has flexibilty, and if you are doing your best and co-operting with your Trustee, you should not have anything to worry about.

I'm confused about this, surely your trustee should have identified what you can afford during initial meetings and this is what you would have agreed to pay when signing the form to proceed with the application. If you knew that the costs would escalate by £200/month you wouldn't have been so keen to proceed. After all, I would imagine that once your name is published in the Edi Gazette, alternative solutions are going to be minimal. If my trustee came back to me and told me that my payments would increase by £100/month, I would be furious that he let me proceed in the first place.

This could still happen to me, hence the reason I'm concerned

Thanks for the reply SkintAlly

The creditor who objects queried your monthly expenditure, things like fuel costs where deemed high by their guidlines, but both my wife and I drive to work and our fuel expenses were accurate, high, but accurate.

Also, i work away from home for 3 nights a week and have to pretty much buy 3 meals a day for 1 person, meaning my wife also has to buy 3 meals for 1 person, which works out considerable for expensive than meals for 2 people.

None of this was considered by the creditor in question. As far as they were concerned we were one couple and our expenses exceeded their guidlines for cetain things, regardless how far we have to travel to work.

In the end we had to agree to pay the extra for go bankrupt now. We still may end up bankrupt if we can't reduce your expenditure further (which we believe is currently pretty much as low as it can go), but we thought we would give it a go and see how we get on, even if it only postpones bankrupcy for a few more months.

Thanks

PB

Anyway, our TD is protected as of 5.00pm yesterday (at the additional £200/month). We will see how we get on keep you updated.

I have to say, we are a bit pissed that the creditor waited until the final day before objecting, it has really taken away from what we felt would be a good, landmark day for us, the day we finally got the ball back in our court and started to take control of our financial future.

PB

I can imagine this would have been very frustrating for you. It is unusual for this to happen as trustee's are advised of the requirements that have to be met so that the can design your payment if you like.

Hi poorboy

I have never had a creditor come back to me looking for an increase in contribution and I am talking about thousands of creditors receiving proposals.

The Income/expense should have been worked out by the Trustee and should have been as near as damn to correct. A variation of £200 is certainly strange.

Being ever suspicious, I would ask which creditor(s) requested the payment as I find it unlikely they would all come to the same conclusion to seek additional £200 and ask for copy correspondence of their objection.

Mark

Hi Poorboy

I agree with Mark, it was upto your trust deed firm to fight this for you, £200 extra is most unusual. If there are going to be objections, yy usually is at the last minute. Although we now have the guidlines from creditors, that is what they are ~ guidlines. If a TD is put forward with higher than normal costs, an explanation can be given to support the expenditure. I am extremely disappointed that this has happened to you -bankruptcy may have been a better option.