The amendment of the 1974 Consumer Credit Act in 2006 seems to have caused quite a few cats to pounce on quite a few pigeons. In particular, whether or not people can write off credit card debt by following the new provisions of the Act has become quite a bone of contention.
With so many referring to this as a scam or some kind of con trick, it is worth considering that the Act was amended for the express purposes of protecting consumers from greedy and negligent lenders. Therefore, using this amendment to write off credit card debt is in no way a misuse of it, not is it a con or a scam.
Instead, the issue may rather be what some third parties are offering to charge you for conducting a process which ordinary people could actually do themselves. To write off credit card debt should not be an expensive process.
It seems that some legal (or paralegal) firms are seeking to charge up to 50% of the written off proceeds to the client. This, it seems to me, is to be confusing the service with the debt settlement services in the United States, which actually negotiate an adjustment of a person's credit card balance with the lender. In the U.K. the issue is one of law rather than one of will or expediency (either a debt agreement is valid or it isn't). But it seems that U.K. companies are seeing what is being done across the pond and applying that scale of fees to a completely different function.
This leads to inflationary fees and an obfuscation of what is actually being done here. When you write off credit card debt you are using the law (some still call it a 'loophole', though it is not) to prove that the debt is unenforceable because the owner of the debt (in many cases a debt purchasing company) cannot prove either that the original documentation complies with the 2006 amendment, or that such documentation exists at all. To charge 50% of the write-off value for showing that a bit of paper does not exist is a bit much, surely?
Add to the mix that some of the firms advertising such services are not specialist solicitors at all, but paralegals or general practice jobbing solicitors (that is not to say that both these are not totally worthy and completely professional entities, only that a one-size-fits-all approach is usually not the best, especially in matters involving legal complexity) and one may wonder how such fees are justified. In order to write off credit card debt you can do the whole thing yourself with a bit of guidance and some template letters. Or you could get a specialist solicitor who has spent years specialising in insolvency to give you a hand.
If the latter case I've seen reasonable fees of around 10 to 15 percent of the written-off figure. The better practices will offer this to be paid over a period of several months, which will be no more of a burden on the consumer than paying the minimum credit card instalment every month for four months.
Of course, people paying the minimum instalment in this way would normally not see a sizeable drop in the capital value of the debt at all. The difference here is that, after four months, the debt will have effectively disappeared.
With so many referring to this as a scam or some kind of con trick, it is worth considering that the Act was amended for the express purposes of protecting consumers from greedy and negligent lenders. Therefore, using this amendment to write off credit card debt is in no way a misuse of it, not is it a con or a scam.
Instead, the issue may rather be what some third parties are offering to charge you for conducting a process which ordinary people could actually do themselves. To write off credit card debt should not be an expensive process.
It seems that some legal (or paralegal) firms are seeking to charge up to 50% of the written off proceeds to the client. This, it seems to me, is to be confusing the service with the debt settlement services in the United States, which actually negotiate an adjustment of a person's credit card balance with the lender. In the U.K. the issue is one of law rather than one of will or expediency (either a debt agreement is valid or it isn't). But it seems that U.K. companies are seeing what is being done across the pond and applying that scale of fees to a completely different function.
This leads to inflationary fees and an obfuscation of what is actually being done here. When you write off credit card debt you are using the law (some still call it a 'loophole', though it is not) to prove that the debt is unenforceable because the owner of the debt (in many cases a debt purchasing company) cannot prove either that the original documentation complies with the 2006 amendment, or that such documentation exists at all. To charge 50% of the write-off value for showing that a bit of paper does not exist is a bit much, surely?
Add to the mix that some of the firms advertising such services are not specialist solicitors at all, but paralegals or general practice jobbing solicitors (that is not to say that both these are not totally worthy and completely professional entities, only that a one-size-fits-all approach is usually not the best, especially in matters involving legal complexity) and one may wonder how such fees are justified. In order to write off credit card debt you can do the whole thing yourself with a bit of guidance and some template letters. Or you could get a specialist solicitor who has spent years specialising in insolvency to give you a hand.
If the latter case I've seen reasonable fees of around 10 to 15 percent of the written-off figure. The better practices will offer this to be paid over a period of several months, which will be no more of a burden on the consumer than paying the minimum credit card instalment every month for four months.
Of course, people paying the minimum instalment in this way would normally not see a sizeable drop in the capital value of the debt at all. The difference here is that, after four months, the debt will have effectively disappeared.
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