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Sorry in advance for the extremely long post but I wanted to provide some background to my situation before asking for some help in dealing with a particularly annoying DCA that are being very uncooperative in my attempts to settle an old credit card account.
Between 1999 – 2004 I managed to accumulate approx. £37,000 of unsecured debts spread between a series of loans, hire purchase, store and credit cards. Some, but not all of this spending was down to me; unfortunately I fell into the trap of being very young (22 at this point) and silly and allowed an ex-boyfriend to totally take me to the cleaners! We basically ran up joint debts but the majority of the spending was on cards/agreements that were in my name only. We also had a joint mortgage with NRAM at 99% LTV. With both of us in full time employment, and him transferring me 50% of the required monthly payments there was no problem at all with keeping up with what was required on a monthly basis…. Until we split up! We separated in 2004 and he literally disappeared off the face of the earth for the best part of 9 years, leaving me well and truly in trouble!
Shortly after the break up I realised that I had to take a very long hard look at my situation and work out how I was going to deal with the £37k of debts and manage to keep our joint mortgage going, especially since my outgoings were significantly higher than my now single income! …At the age of 24 of I finally grasped the concept of APR and the absolute dire situation that I was now in! My mind set at that time was that preserving my credit score and not going bankrupt were my top priorities, no matter how long it took me to clear everything down. (Oh how I wish I’d just bitten the bullet back then and entered into some sort of debt management program straight away… I’d be 100% clear by now and my life would be significantly different)!
Between 2004 – 2008, every spare penny I had was going towards clearing off my debts but despite paying on average £580 per month faultlessly for all that time, I’d barely made a dent in the capital I owed.
In 2007 I was made redundant and received a healthy payout which I promptly used the majority of to clear down a big chunk of my outstanding debts (making sure to deal with the most expensive ones first). At the time I was made redundant I already had another job to go to so I thought I was doing the right thing but in hindsight, this was another big mistake! Largely due to the recession hitting in 2008, the new role (a change in career) was not a success and I ended up unemployed for 5 months shortly afterwards!
During that time period everything went horribly wrong once again for me and I ended up in almost as much debt again through further borrowing and an accumulation of charges and interest over the time I was unable to make full payments for a short while! I’ll save the details for later but in short after being harassed by HSBC collections call centres about 6 times a day for about a year, I finally succumbed and entered into a DMP in 2010! (… I even managed to get that wrong however as I was in a fee paying DMP and was unaware at the time that I could have had the same service for free and have been clearing off even more of my debt)! I was paying into this DMP faultlessly until July of this year when I decided that it was time to put a stop to giving them £60pcm for something I can do myself now!
Over the last few months I’ve been making good progress with all of my debts, I’ve cleared down a number of agreements as I came into some additional funds after my current partner got me a new car and I decided to sell it and use the proceeds to clear off as much as I could. Today, I have 3 remaining debts to clear:
£1531 – Barclaycard, (Agreement to pay £26 PCM in place)
£4338 – Idem Capital Securities (Ex MBNA card) (Agreement to pay £105 PCM in place)
£4966 – Moorgate (Ex HSBC card – In Default). (Refusing to accept a monthly payment of £95 PCM…. £10 more PCM than they’ve been getting for the last 4 years through the DMP)!
The above is all based on my current situation as of today…. My circumstances are about to change significantly for the better as I’m about to embark on moving into a new house with my partner and we’ll be sharing all of our living costs moving forwards. At that time, I’ll be able to clear off a minimum of £1000 PCM perhaps more to get this final chunk forever sorted out! (….I can hardly believe that after 15 years of hard slog, I’m almost there)! My plan is to hit Idem first then clear off the Barclaycard with everything I have as they are showing as ‘green’ on my credit report… once they’re cleared off they will be ‘Satisfactory and Settled in Full’ so all good there!
My problem is with Moorgate and what to do about them!?...
Moorgate are the current DCA looking after my old HSBC credit card taken out in June 2000. I don’t have a copy of my original Credit Agreement so I couldn’t tell you what the Ts&Cs were in terms of interest rates and minimum payments etc. Between 2000 and 2010 I made every single minimum payment due and often paid off larger amounts when possible.
At that time I also had x2 Current accounts with HSBC both with a £500 OD limit. During my period of unemployment in 2008 I had moved into my partner’s rented property and rented out my own, in order to be able to continue meeting the mortgage repayments whilst out of work. Sadly, (like everything I seem to embark on) even this couldn’t work out for me! The tenants never once paid their rent on time in the 8 months that they lived in my property! After the second month of them paying late and having run out of savings left to cover the shortfall when my mortgage was due to be paid, I called HSBC and tried to get them to help me. I requested that they temporarily raised my OD limit to £1000 for a period of 2 weeks to allow the mortgage to be paid and then the rental funds to arrive late but they were not prepared to help me in any way shape or form! They wouldn’t even agree to refuse to make the payment for my mortgage stating that only NRAM could cancel the direct debit! (I found this odd but they wouldn't budge)! … As a result, I ended up in a vicious circle of charges upon charges and no way of paying this back. When I started working again I was left with no choice but to open a fresh bank account with a new bank, leaving my 2 £500 ODs maxed out over at HSBC.
Once I was getting paid into my new bank account I was able to take full stock of my situation again and embark on making at least my minimum payments now that I had a new job. I contacted HSBC and explained why I’d been forced to move away from them but that I had every intention of paying back the £1000 that I owed them. (Despite most of this compromising of their unfair charges) I offered them £5 per month on each account for the next 6 months, with a promise to review and increase the amount as much as possible at that time. They refused to accept this amount and I entered in to some weird ‘Groundhog Day’ type phone war with their collections department in India for the next year! (I did continue to make my £10 worth of payments each month though). This situation resulted in me approaching a DMP and getting them to handle all of my affairs moving forwards. I paid them every month and the calls finally stopped!
Everything ticked over nicely for about 3.5 years and then I started looking at moving house and getting a new mortgage….. to my horror, my credit file is showing 3 defaults that I was totally unaware of! All of my lenders accepted the repayment terms proposed by the DMP and froze the interest on my accounts with no problems at all. But my dear friends over at HSBC decided to reap their revenge on me by accepting the payments but putting all of my accounts with them into default and then passing them on to DCAs shortly afterwards! I cleared off the 2 ODs earlier on this year so they’re finally done and dusted but do show as defaults on my file posted in March and September 2010. (Not sure why they show different dates as everything happened at the same time…. Is there maybe a way I can have this all corrected to show as the earliest date? … that’s one of my many questions on how I should proceed!
When I left my DMP a few months ago I called up Moorgate as they were named as the party HSBC had passed the debt onto and advised them that I was no longer in the DMP and wanted to communicate directly with them. After looking through my credit file in detail I had a number of concerns that the amounts being displayed were incorrect as were the default dates that were applied. (NB, both Moorgate and HSBC were reporting this on my file as 2 separate defaults at one point with totally different sets of info on amounts and dates… Experian have since removed the HSBC entry but I’m still none the wiser on what I actually truly owe or to what I've paid back over the last 14 years)!
I spoke to them back in August and offered them a reduced settlement figure of £2085. During the conversation I advised them that I had been placed ‘at risk’ of redundancy and could very well be out of work within the next 3-4 month time frame. (At that point in time it was the truth but I've now been advised that I've dodged that particular bullet for the time being, thankfully)! I also advised them that I had a chunk of money from the sale of a car that was given as a gift and that I was distributing this out between my creditors in attempt to clear down all of my old debts prior to my possible change in circumstances….Next they sent me a letter saying that they were unable to consider settlement offers without a full understanding of my situation so I needed to provide full income and expenditure details to enable them to move forwards…. I dutifully called them up and provided all of this information over the phone. (I know now this was a mistake)!
My offer was refused in writing shortly afterwards and when I called in to argue this they said that they didn't accept anything less than 100% to settle an account and that I should provide them with full details of my income and expenditure, signed and in writing at my earliest convenience so they could agree a monthly payment amount with me moving forwards! …I explained that I’d already done that over the phone on a previous call and that I could only afford to pay £95 PCM for the time being and would possibly end up shortly not being able to pay anything at all. Cue another run through of my entire financial breakdown on the phone with them where I clearly displayed that £95 PCM was the maximum I could afford to pay right now (since they’d missed their chance on settlement earlier and now the extra funds I had cleared off other debts, not theirs)...
Even though this is more than they’ve been getting for the last few years the greedy beggars refused this on the grounds that my ‘housekeeping bills’ are deemed higher than the government guidelines!! (…err…what?!!)! The call agent advised me that they refused to accept anything less than £220PCM or they’re sending the file to their doorstep collections team! This totally infuriated me and I lost the plot slightly on the phone but did manage to tell them that I wasn’t paying them another penny until they proved to me exactly how much I’d actually ever owed HSBC in the first place, plus how much I’ve paid back of the original debt, plus how much has been added on each time they’ve passed the file from DCA to DCA over the years etc etc. I demanded that they send me a full statement of my account from the day it was opened and also a full copy of my original credit agreement before I was prepared to enter into any kind of further discussion with them.
They advised me that they would send me a full statement of the account from when they had taken it over as soon as possible but that they had to go back to HSBC to request the historical information. I received a letter from them a few days later with a list of my payments to Moorgate since March 2013. The account has been with them since at least 2012 and they haven’t sent me any further evidence of this since my request. I assume HSBC have not been able to provide this information so far… one of the steps I’m considering taking next is issuing HSBC with a formal SAR request directly. Does anyone have any advice/thoughts they can share on this topic based on my situation please?
As for the CCA request, although I didn't request this in writing with the required £1 payment, I have received a letter back from them dated 20 October 2014 stating the following:
‘Further to your earlier request for a copy of the original credit card agreement on 9th September 2014, please note that we requested this for you from HSBC Bank plc. However, unfortunately we have been informed that this document is unavailable.
We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.
Should you have any further queries, please don’t hesitate to contact us and we will be happy to assist you.
Yours sincerely
Manager of the Servicing Department’
….so, at this point, based on a lot of reading that I've been doing lately, I figured, for once, I might actually be home dry and off the hook for one tiny chunk of the masses of debt that I've dutifully paid off over the last 15 years! I decided to sit back, hold my breath and see what happens next! At this point in time I think that the debt might well be ‘unenforceable’….. is this a correct assumption please?
Sadly, my little bubble of hope was burst at 08:10 this Saturday morning when Moorgate very kindly called me up (luckily my phone was on silent) and left me a message asking me to call them back! I know the first thing I need to do is write to them and insist on no more verbal communication! But from this point on I’m a little cloudy about where I actually stand! It seems too good to be true (and just my luck not to be) that something this simple could enable me to finally tell them where to go!
…if anybody’s still awake after reading my epic debt journey, I’d really appreciate some advice on my final hurdle in getting my life straightened out once and for all! …. I really want to make the right move and as you've probably gathered if you’re still reading this, I haven’t exactly done a great job at managing things on my own so far!
Many thanks in advance for any help that’s offered!
FEL1C1TY
Between 1999 – 2004 I managed to accumulate approx. £37,000 of unsecured debts spread between a series of loans, hire purchase, store and credit cards. Some, but not all of this spending was down to me; unfortunately I fell into the trap of being very young (22 at this point) and silly and allowed an ex-boyfriend to totally take me to the cleaners! We basically ran up joint debts but the majority of the spending was on cards/agreements that were in my name only. We also had a joint mortgage with NRAM at 99% LTV. With both of us in full time employment, and him transferring me 50% of the required monthly payments there was no problem at all with keeping up with what was required on a monthly basis…. Until we split up! We separated in 2004 and he literally disappeared off the face of the earth for the best part of 9 years, leaving me well and truly in trouble!
Shortly after the break up I realised that I had to take a very long hard look at my situation and work out how I was going to deal with the £37k of debts and manage to keep our joint mortgage going, especially since my outgoings were significantly higher than my now single income! …At the age of 24 of I finally grasped the concept of APR and the absolute dire situation that I was now in! My mind set at that time was that preserving my credit score and not going bankrupt were my top priorities, no matter how long it took me to clear everything down. (Oh how I wish I’d just bitten the bullet back then and entered into some sort of debt management program straight away… I’d be 100% clear by now and my life would be significantly different)!
Between 2004 – 2008, every spare penny I had was going towards clearing off my debts but despite paying on average £580 per month faultlessly for all that time, I’d barely made a dent in the capital I owed.
In 2007 I was made redundant and received a healthy payout which I promptly used the majority of to clear down a big chunk of my outstanding debts (making sure to deal with the most expensive ones first). At the time I was made redundant I already had another job to go to so I thought I was doing the right thing but in hindsight, this was another big mistake! Largely due to the recession hitting in 2008, the new role (a change in career) was not a success and I ended up unemployed for 5 months shortly afterwards!
During that time period everything went horribly wrong once again for me and I ended up in almost as much debt again through further borrowing and an accumulation of charges and interest over the time I was unable to make full payments for a short while! I’ll save the details for later but in short after being harassed by HSBC collections call centres about 6 times a day for about a year, I finally succumbed and entered into a DMP in 2010! (… I even managed to get that wrong however as I was in a fee paying DMP and was unaware at the time that I could have had the same service for free and have been clearing off even more of my debt)! I was paying into this DMP faultlessly until July of this year when I decided that it was time to put a stop to giving them £60pcm for something I can do myself now!
Over the last few months I’ve been making good progress with all of my debts, I’ve cleared down a number of agreements as I came into some additional funds after my current partner got me a new car and I decided to sell it and use the proceeds to clear off as much as I could. Today, I have 3 remaining debts to clear:
£1531 – Barclaycard, (Agreement to pay £26 PCM in place)
£4338 – Idem Capital Securities (Ex MBNA card) (Agreement to pay £105 PCM in place)
£4966 – Moorgate (Ex HSBC card – In Default). (Refusing to accept a monthly payment of £95 PCM…. £10 more PCM than they’ve been getting for the last 4 years through the DMP)!
The above is all based on my current situation as of today…. My circumstances are about to change significantly for the better as I’m about to embark on moving into a new house with my partner and we’ll be sharing all of our living costs moving forwards. At that time, I’ll be able to clear off a minimum of £1000 PCM perhaps more to get this final chunk forever sorted out! (….I can hardly believe that after 15 years of hard slog, I’m almost there)! My plan is to hit Idem first then clear off the Barclaycard with everything I have as they are showing as ‘green’ on my credit report… once they’re cleared off they will be ‘Satisfactory and Settled in Full’ so all good there!
My problem is with Moorgate and what to do about them!?...
Moorgate are the current DCA looking after my old HSBC credit card taken out in June 2000. I don’t have a copy of my original Credit Agreement so I couldn’t tell you what the Ts&Cs were in terms of interest rates and minimum payments etc. Between 2000 and 2010 I made every single minimum payment due and often paid off larger amounts when possible.
At that time I also had x2 Current accounts with HSBC both with a £500 OD limit. During my period of unemployment in 2008 I had moved into my partner’s rented property and rented out my own, in order to be able to continue meeting the mortgage repayments whilst out of work. Sadly, (like everything I seem to embark on) even this couldn’t work out for me! The tenants never once paid their rent on time in the 8 months that they lived in my property! After the second month of them paying late and having run out of savings left to cover the shortfall when my mortgage was due to be paid, I called HSBC and tried to get them to help me. I requested that they temporarily raised my OD limit to £1000 for a period of 2 weeks to allow the mortgage to be paid and then the rental funds to arrive late but they were not prepared to help me in any way shape or form! They wouldn’t even agree to refuse to make the payment for my mortgage stating that only NRAM could cancel the direct debit! (I found this odd but they wouldn't budge)! … As a result, I ended up in a vicious circle of charges upon charges and no way of paying this back. When I started working again I was left with no choice but to open a fresh bank account with a new bank, leaving my 2 £500 ODs maxed out over at HSBC.
Once I was getting paid into my new bank account I was able to take full stock of my situation again and embark on making at least my minimum payments now that I had a new job. I contacted HSBC and explained why I’d been forced to move away from them but that I had every intention of paying back the £1000 that I owed them. (Despite most of this compromising of their unfair charges) I offered them £5 per month on each account for the next 6 months, with a promise to review and increase the amount as much as possible at that time. They refused to accept this amount and I entered in to some weird ‘Groundhog Day’ type phone war with their collections department in India for the next year! (I did continue to make my £10 worth of payments each month though). This situation resulted in me approaching a DMP and getting them to handle all of my affairs moving forwards. I paid them every month and the calls finally stopped!
Everything ticked over nicely for about 3.5 years and then I started looking at moving house and getting a new mortgage….. to my horror, my credit file is showing 3 defaults that I was totally unaware of! All of my lenders accepted the repayment terms proposed by the DMP and froze the interest on my accounts with no problems at all. But my dear friends over at HSBC decided to reap their revenge on me by accepting the payments but putting all of my accounts with them into default and then passing them on to DCAs shortly afterwards! I cleared off the 2 ODs earlier on this year so they’re finally done and dusted but do show as defaults on my file posted in March and September 2010. (Not sure why they show different dates as everything happened at the same time…. Is there maybe a way I can have this all corrected to show as the earliest date? … that’s one of my many questions on how I should proceed!
When I left my DMP a few months ago I called up Moorgate as they were named as the party HSBC had passed the debt onto and advised them that I was no longer in the DMP and wanted to communicate directly with them. After looking through my credit file in detail I had a number of concerns that the amounts being displayed were incorrect as were the default dates that were applied. (NB, both Moorgate and HSBC were reporting this on my file as 2 separate defaults at one point with totally different sets of info on amounts and dates… Experian have since removed the HSBC entry but I’m still none the wiser on what I actually truly owe or to what I've paid back over the last 14 years)!
I spoke to them back in August and offered them a reduced settlement figure of £2085. During the conversation I advised them that I had been placed ‘at risk’ of redundancy and could very well be out of work within the next 3-4 month time frame. (At that point in time it was the truth but I've now been advised that I've dodged that particular bullet for the time being, thankfully)! I also advised them that I had a chunk of money from the sale of a car that was given as a gift and that I was distributing this out between my creditors in attempt to clear down all of my old debts prior to my possible change in circumstances….Next they sent me a letter saying that they were unable to consider settlement offers without a full understanding of my situation so I needed to provide full income and expenditure details to enable them to move forwards…. I dutifully called them up and provided all of this information over the phone. (I know now this was a mistake)!
My offer was refused in writing shortly afterwards and when I called in to argue this they said that they didn't accept anything less than 100% to settle an account and that I should provide them with full details of my income and expenditure, signed and in writing at my earliest convenience so they could agree a monthly payment amount with me moving forwards! …I explained that I’d already done that over the phone on a previous call and that I could only afford to pay £95 PCM for the time being and would possibly end up shortly not being able to pay anything at all. Cue another run through of my entire financial breakdown on the phone with them where I clearly displayed that £95 PCM was the maximum I could afford to pay right now (since they’d missed their chance on settlement earlier and now the extra funds I had cleared off other debts, not theirs)...
Even though this is more than they’ve been getting for the last few years the greedy beggars refused this on the grounds that my ‘housekeeping bills’ are deemed higher than the government guidelines!! (…err…what?!!)! The call agent advised me that they refused to accept anything less than £220PCM or they’re sending the file to their doorstep collections team! This totally infuriated me and I lost the plot slightly on the phone but did manage to tell them that I wasn’t paying them another penny until they proved to me exactly how much I’d actually ever owed HSBC in the first place, plus how much I’ve paid back of the original debt, plus how much has been added on each time they’ve passed the file from DCA to DCA over the years etc etc. I demanded that they send me a full statement of my account from the day it was opened and also a full copy of my original credit agreement before I was prepared to enter into any kind of further discussion with them.
They advised me that they would send me a full statement of the account from when they had taken it over as soon as possible but that they had to go back to HSBC to request the historical information. I received a letter from them a few days later with a list of my payments to Moorgate since March 2013. The account has been with them since at least 2012 and they haven’t sent me any further evidence of this since my request. I assume HSBC have not been able to provide this information so far… one of the steps I’m considering taking next is issuing HSBC with a formal SAR request directly. Does anyone have any advice/thoughts they can share on this topic based on my situation please?
As for the CCA request, although I didn't request this in writing with the required £1 payment, I have received a letter back from them dated 20 October 2014 stating the following:
‘Further to your earlier request for a copy of the original credit card agreement on 9th September 2014, please note that we requested this for you from HSBC Bank plc. However, unfortunately we have been informed that this document is unavailable.
We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.
Should you have any further queries, please don’t hesitate to contact us and we will be happy to assist you.
Yours sincerely
Manager of the Servicing Department’
….so, at this point, based on a lot of reading that I've been doing lately, I figured, for once, I might actually be home dry and off the hook for one tiny chunk of the masses of debt that I've dutifully paid off over the last 15 years! I decided to sit back, hold my breath and see what happens next! At this point in time I think that the debt might well be ‘unenforceable’….. is this a correct assumption please?
Sadly, my little bubble of hope was burst at 08:10 this Saturday morning when Moorgate very kindly called me up (luckily my phone was on silent) and left me a message asking me to call them back! I know the first thing I need to do is write to them and insist on no more verbal communication! But from this point on I’m a little cloudy about where I actually stand! It seems too good to be true (and just my luck not to be) that something this simple could enable me to finally tell them where to go!
…if anybody’s still awake after reading my epic debt journey, I’d really appreciate some advice on my final hurdle in getting my life straightened out once and for all! …. I really want to make the right move and as you've probably gathered if you’re still reading this, I haven’t exactly done a great job at managing things on my own so far!
Many thanks in advance for any help that’s offered!
FEL1C1TY
to AAD which is a great place to unload as you can see.
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