How To Get The Best Debt Consolidation Help

Debt Consolidation help will be found in two main forms. Firstly, people will usually think of some kind of consolidation loan to ease their financial problems for a while. But that is not the whole story. A loan is like a sticking plaster. What is more enduring is a structured management plan, or even an individual voluntary arrangement (IVA). IVAs have been devised as a true solution for personal insolvency.

While consolidation loans are effective over the short term, IVAs are designed to cut your debt completely within five years. Loans make you feel good for a couple of years and get you into deeper debt, while IVAs effectively put you in control and back on the road to true financial stability. True debt consolidation helps you to get out of your financial fix and back into the straight and narrow of fiscal probity and self respect.

It is true that it help can be a quick fix, but the best type will take the form of a structured plan - usually an IVA or a Protected Trust Deed in Scotland - and this will be worked out by a qualified Insolvency Practitioner who will spend some time with your household accounts and then more time negotiating directly with your creditors, as opposed to a loan salesman who will simply get you to sign the papers, say goodbye and wait for his commission.

The negotiation stage will involve your insolvency practitioner negotiating with your creditors collectively so that they all agree to the plan. All creditors are dealt with together under the terms of the IVA; debts are not negotiated separately. The help really starts here, as a massive amount of your debt will be written off at this stage, and your interest frozen. The amount of the debt reduction will vary, but will usually be between sixty and seventy percent of your total debt. That means that up to 70 percent of the total money owed will simply be written off at a stroke.

The next stage in your debt consolidation help will be establishing the amount you can afford to pay your creditors each month. This will be deducted from the money you have left over from your income after meeting your necessary expenses. The insolvency practitioner will work this out so that the sum to be paid is both practical and affordable. This sum must also be agreed by all the creditors collectively for the plan to be put in place.

Once the IVA is set up it is official. It has the same power, more or less, as a court ruling. From now on your creditors are not allowed to bother you. In fact, they are not allowed to contact you in any way. That means they must not phone you or send a representative round to knock at your door; nor should they write to you. If they contact you in any way they will be in breach of the terms of the IVA and therefore in breach of the law; you could take them to court.