debt repayment ..

[bodyboarder]

when having yr income assessed for dept repayment plan should disability living allowances be include or disregarded. i know these payments are disregarded when calculating things like council tax and husing benefit, but have been told that that i have to include them when declaring available income for discharging credit card debt.. any advice welcome.. thanks

[Buenchico]

You need to convince your creditors that your monthly repayment offer is as much as you can reasonably afford. To do that, you have to declare your TOTAL income and your TOTAL outgoings.

Your creditors aren't obliged to accept any repayment offer from you. They could, if they so chose, seek immediate court action to obtain CCJs against you (or even to petition for your bankruptcy). If you you want them to help you, you must declare everything that you've got coming in.

Further, failure to declare income (when required to do so) could constitute a criminal offence under the Fraud Act 2006.

Chris

[bodyboarder]

thanks...it's not that i don't want to discharge mydebts as soon as poss, it's just that it's difficult to explain what the dla pays for in terms of weekly or monthly outgoings.... keep hearing abt ways of having debts written off but they never seem to apply to me !

[themas]

1. Chris's para. about fraud is not applicable in this situation. Anything done between you & your creditors is a voluntary arrangement, not one where you have a legal requirement to do something.

2. Seems to me you could do with some advice on what your best option is. Contact CCCS or go to your local CAB. Do NOT get involved with any fee charging so called "debt management" company.

3. What is frequently done about DLA, is to show it as income & then show the same amount as expenditure with a note that this is expenditure in relation to your disabilities. However, this does depend on what your circumstances actually are, & what you actually do with the money. Also, it can be difficult to separate it out from other expenditure items - for example someone who is housebound might use some of their DLA to make a lot of phone calls so as to keep in touch with friends & family. This would result in a much larger phone bill than normal, only part of which could be said to be use of disability money.