You should contact your mortgage lender immediately and explain your circumstances and ask them to “assess your means” they will then decide if you are eligible for either a payment break or reduce payments for a certain length of time.

If the re-possession is granted and your house sold at auction you will be expected to repay the shortfall that is generated, this would become an unsecured debt and you would make an arrangement directly with the lender to repay this at an amount both parties are happy with.

If you do not respond to the reminder notices by contacting your lender and arranging a repayment plan for your arrears it is likely they will continue writing to you and eventually look to take further action against you through the County Courts in order to recover the debt.

Each application you make is registered on your credit file, lenders can view this when establishing whether or not you are suitable to lend money to, they will then compare you against their own criteria before deciding whether or not to accept your application.

There are Debt Consolidation Loans available, however, many feel this is going back to “square one” in order to repay existing credit with new credit, therefore many people look at alternative options such as IVA’s and Debt Management.

There is an option for your creditor to secure the debt against your property, should you then default of the payment amount set by the Court they could enforce this charge by way of making you sell the property.

Your partner will need to know if you do an IVA as we will need information from him/her regarding your joint income, however your IVA will not affect his/her credit rating.

An IVA is a confidential arrangement between your self and your creditors that we would facilitate, nobody else would need to be aware of this, however the IVA would appear on the Individual Insolvency Register but someone would have to search on your name to find this.

As long as your car is essential for you to earn a living or run your household and as long as it’s not excessively valuable you will not be asked to sell it.

If you are thinking of doing an IVA your credit rating will probably already be poor. Your credit rating will be affected during the IVA and for a further one year after the IVA had been completed.