Hi Gordo,
Once a trust deed becomes "protected" - usually 5 or 6 weeks after signing up - it should stop you receiving not only the knock on the door but also any letters or phone calls too. That's part of the beauty of it - it has the force of law behind it so your creditors cannot ignore it and can no longer take any action against you, meaning proper relief from your situation.

By the way - I've only just joined this site as a resident expert so thanks for being my first query (of many, I imagine!)

What does "protected" mean Kevin?

I want to pay back what I owe but really want to avoid any impact on my family for the bad decisions I've made.

Gordo

Nae Cash

When a trust deed becomes "protected" it means that by law none of your creditors are allowed to take any further action to recover their debt from you. So this should mean that you could stop worrying about any potential negative impact on your family.

To gain protected status, your trustee (the insolvency practitioner) will write to all of your creditors giving them details of your circumstances and estimating how much they will receive through the trust deed. Your name would also have to go into a publication called the Edinburgh Gazette (don't worry - this isn't like a newspaper you can buy in your local shop). Your creditors then have 5 weeks in which they are entitled to object to the trust deed becoming protected. As long as not more than half in number of them, or more than a third in value of them, object in that time then the trust deed becomes protected and all creditors are bound by it.

In practice the vast majority of trust deeds do get protection.

Hope this makes sense!

So if one of the creditors doesn't agree I cannot do a Trust Deed?

Gordo

Nae Cash

Depends on how much the debt is. If you owe more than a third of your total debt to that one creditor then it would mean that your trust deed would fail to get protected. However, normally it would be less than a third and the trust deed would still achieve protection. That's one of the big advantages of trust deeds - if you have one or two awkward creditors they can often be effectively forced to go along with what is being proposed.