someadviceplease

Hi guys,



First post here so please bear with me



I currently live in Australia and have done so for almost two years now...



I left England owing about 16000... in the first year I tried and was able to keep up with the payments... however now I cant and now am being chased for the money back home... the debt collectors are regularly calling my parents place (were all of my debt is addressed to)...



I cannot afford the payments and was wondering if bankruptcy was the option??? I have no intention of living in the UK anytime soon.. so going through bankruptcy and suffering a few years of bad credit back home does not concern me too much...



Ive been doing research and understand that obviously it effects you later on in life with credit, etc...



Am I able to apply for bankruptcy from overseas?? Or do I have to apply for it back home? Is this the best option?? or should I consider something else..im not overly concerned about the debt but want to sort it one way or another... I also want to stop the calls to the parents place...



Any advice would be much appreciated.



Thanks

sr71

No recomendation because I haven't used them, but you can try :

www.myvesta.org.uk

You can't have been out of the country for more than 3 years though.

ABCDiamond

The first thing you should do, is get your parents to write to them, saying you no longer live there.

That should stop them from having any direct contact with your parents, if they are not involved in the debt.

peaceboy

yehhh...... ask your parents to write them & tell that you are no longer live with them adn that you have already left the country for good.

after that they will definitely stop calling your parents if they are not involved in it such as a Guarantor etc.

after that you can just forget them as they wont be able to trace you since you don't live in UK anymore. but you will have a problem when ever you return home.

Pollyana

Advice like that is actually dangerous, as it isn't 100% accurate. For a large enough debt they may well track you down to Australia.

I suggest the OP searches for previous threads on the subject of debt.

The O'Neills

I went backpacking in Oz years ago. I had suspended repayment of my student loan, as wasn't earning over 16k pa. However, the Student Loan company managed to track me down to the hostel where I was working and started demanding payment from OZ! - not a word of a lie. Nightmare!

Nic

DrWho

The British government is well known (and admired by other countries!) for it's ability to track down defaulters of the student loan scheme. The cynic in me does not discount the possibility that the trackers have access to information that the purely commercial debt chasers don't...

DrWho

Quite. And there's the reciprocal agreement between the two countries that can make a civil judgement in one country enforceable in the other.

Yeah, there's plenty of reading material out there...

DrWho

The first thing you should do is talk to someone who actually knows what they're talking about.

If it was me I'd ask my parents who their Solicitor is and then I'd have a lengthy phone call with them. You might well get passed over to somewhere else, and yes it'll cost you money, but it's a good place to start.

And do do something about this. People that are owed money feel a lot better about dealing with people that want to address the problem rather than run and hide. And when it's resolved you'll feel a lot better too...!

Oh, and writing to people to say that you don't live there any more won't stop your parents getting hassled... 16k is enough to get someone knocking on the door...

tsophia

sorry no idea on this u can try it.
<a href="http://www.shepelskylaw.com">http://www.shepelskylaw.com</a>
tsophia

TiddlyPom

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

It is increasingly common for UK companies to trace people abroad. They do it more and more now. They will find you and they will instruct a local solicitor to get the money from you... depending on the amount. Usually, if it's under 1000 quid, it's not worth their while and they write it off, but they will have to prove, under UK law that they made enough attempts to contact you before they can do this. This means that they have to show their letters to you, the phone calls etc in a log book to prove they have tried their best to find you and make you pay.

If you choose to stay out of contact, then you are inviting a heap of trouble for yourself. What if you need to go back home if one of your parents is ill? It would be a sad event if you felt you couldn't go back to the UK for a funeral, don't you think?

Firstly, do not be afraid of your debt.
Yes, for 16,000, they will chase you, absolutely, do not doubt it. However, compared to some debts, 16K isn't really that much and I certainly wouldn't advise you to declare yourself bankrupt for such a small sum. The knock on effects will not be worth it. And trust me when I say I looked at it closely during our own business collapse in the UK. 16K is really not that much.

Your parents can write and tell them you no longer live there and it would be in their best interests to do so.

Secondly, get in touch with the solicitors who are trying to get you to pay your debt. You need to tell them that you are struggling to pay but that you WANT TO pay them and you are WILLING (say those words) to pay the debt. Next, you make an offer to them.

Ask them if they are willing to reduce the debt to a more manageable amount. They can only say 'no'.
If they do say no, then you need to set up an offer to pay them something. You can offer what you can truly pay, so if you can only pay $20 a month, then offer this to them over a period of time to clear the debt.
Legally, they cannot refuse an offer to pay, as I understand it.

If they refuse and wish to take you to court, it will cost them more, and your finances will be assessed and the court will decide what you can afford, so it's in your interests to make some sort of payment.
If you are being seen to be making an effort to pay the bill, the solicitor will handle it for you (or they'll pass it onto a debt collection company who will do the negotiations with you) and you can clear your debt without any further legal judgements against you.

If you keep paying your $20 a month for two years, you can then ask if they can reduce the debt if you can make a cash settlement... perhaps down the line your circumstances will have improved? Eventually, your debt may well be written off by the company when it becomes lower... this happened to me on a BT bill which was run up by some new people in my flat after I moved somewhere else. BT didn't disconnect the phone when I asked them to, so the tenants rang their relatives for hours in Nigeria. I can laugh about it now, but then it sucked. I ended up with a phone bill in my name for a few grand.
When the debt got to 400 quid, they let me off the rest... and wrote it off.

So look, don't skip the debt. You can tell them that you are in financial difficulties but you WANT to pay them. If you do this, you can live an easier life and please don't tell me you can't afford $20 a month... even I can do that on a single parent payment and three children.... What you're saying is that you can't afford what they want you to pay. That's different and that's why you have to negotiate.

The UK gov will always find you and so will a solicitor acting for a company you defaulted to. You cannot skip a debt by living in Australia any more.

Good luck with it all.