How to Write Off Your Credit Card Debt

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If you want to write off your credit card debt there are two ways it can be done. Both of them are quite legal. Both of them may be done by an individual doing it himself or herself, or with the help of a qualified professional such as a solicitor or an Insolvency Practitioner.

What follows is related to credit cards, but actually it also relates to any kind of agreement such as a loan, car finance, store cards, hire purchase and most other types of finance. But it does not relate to mobile phone contracts or certain other niche agreements.

The first thing to do when you want to write off your credit card debt is to have a look at the original contract you signed. The law says that if you signed the contract before 6th April 2007 then it must detail certain things known as the prescribed terms. These include quite basic items, but it is thought that as many as seven out of every ten contracts do not contain them.

If that is the case then the credit agreement is deemed unenforceable. Even a court can not enforce it. The same is true if the lender can not produce a fair copy of the contract. (The same is also true if the contract does contain the prescribed terms but lacks a signature.)

It will be noted that credit cards (or any loan) which have been defaulted on and passed to a debt collection agency or debt purchaser will often be more liable to fall into this category, as the new owner of the account (the purchasing company) will not usually have been given the original contract; they are the bottom-feeders of the industry and usually buy bad debts in bulk and with little interest in formalities like having the correct paperwork. It is worth noting this important point when wanting to write off your credit card debt, as these firms will be the easiest to target if you choose to go it alone without professional help.

The second way to write off your credit card debt is to enter into an Individual Voluntary Arrangement, or IVA. This is done with the help of a qualified Insolvency Practitioner, who will draw up an income and expenditure budget and establish how much you can afford to pay your creditors. The bulk of this is written off and you enter into a legal contract to pay the remaining amount off by a fixed sum every month over a period of time, usually 60 months.

An IVA typically writes off around 70% of debt. If you use both of the above methods together to write off your credit card debt you may clear as much as 90% of your burden, leaving only 10% to pay off over five years.

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Source by Gordon Goodfellow