Confidential debt advice you can trust

A Debt Management Plan is an informal plan and doesn’t involve any legal process or agreement from your creditors. This means that it can be very quick to set up. We’ll need to confirm your identity (we can often do this electronically) and you’ll need to sign a document giving us authority to deal with your creditors.

You’ll also need to provide us with your creditor names and, ideally, any reference numbers. Once we have this information, we can start to contact your creditors to let them know we’re helping you – again, this can be signed electronically.

This means that a DMP can be set up on the same day that you get debt advice.

Yes, you will receive creditor contact for a while until everything is in place. It’s nothing to worry about, they must send you information such as statements and notices. However, once your creditors know that you’re on a debt management plan, the contact will reduce eventually.

It can take some creditors anything from days to weeks to update on their side, so don’t worry if you receive creditor contact asking for payment. The best thing to do is to continue making the payment to us and if they contact you let them know that you’re getting help from us and ask them to call us instead.

We don’t recommend borrowing more money whilst you’re on a debt management plan. The plan works by figuring out how much you have left every month after paying all your day-to-day living costs. This includes your spending on birthdays, social events, and anything else you’d like to buy. The plan is informal, and we want to make sure you are not restricted and can spend on the things most important to you.

If you take out more credit after the debt management plan is active, you will struggle to repay your debts as you’ve added more to pay. It will be difficult to get further credit whilst in a debt management plan because you probably won’t be able to show the lender that you can afford to repay it. If you need to add more debt to the plan after it’s started, you can contact us to discuss.

Every month you will send us 1 payment that we will use to pay your creditors, the amount will be different for each person. To work out how much you will pay every month, the first step is to get debt advice and fill in all your income and outgoings, from there we will work out how much money you have left over every month to pay towards your debts.

If you’re eligible for a DMP your payment will be the amount you have left every month. From that payment, we take a management fee of £50 for the first 6 months of your plan, then £39.50 per month every month thereafter. The remaining amount goes to your creditors every month to bring down the balance of your debts.

We can deal with debts such as bank account overdrafts, credit cards, catalogues, store cards, unsecured loans and payday loans.

It is essential that you continue to make payments on secured debts such as mortgages and car hire purchase agreements because if you fail to keep up repayments to these debts, the lender may consider legal action or repossession. You must also keep paying priority debts such as rent, council tax, gas and electricity. If you fail to repay these, it could mean you get evicted or the loss of essential goods or services. For more information, please see our different types of debt page.

You will also still be responsible for paying student loan repayments and payments required by the Child Support Agency.

When we work out your budget, we account for the need to maintain these payments when we calculate your monthly payment.

Yes, if you are on a debt management plan you will start to receive updates from your creditors that your account with them is in arrears. This will eventually lead to defaults which are marked on your credit file.

However, if you already missed payments and were struggling to pay your debts, your credit rating may have already been affected. Information about missed payments and defaults will show on your credit file for 6 years and will affect your ability to obtain credit.

Yes, you can cancel your plan at any time by giving us 28 days’ notice. There is no cost to cancel.

If you change your mind within the first 14 days of your plan (cooling-off period), you may be entitled to a refund of any fees that you have paid.