The second golden rule of personal insolvency is:
‘Only choose an option other than bankruptcy if it protects income or assets’
Otherwise, why do it? I’ve already shown you that bankruptcy isn’t as bad as many think or make it out to be, most bankrupts lose no income nor assets. Even those that do lose a little income or low priority assets, the situation is often negotiable (that’s again where we come in!). But with bankruptcy, most of it is in the mind, it’s the word itself, it’s what people think people will think of them. But if you do go into bankruptcy with the right attitude, that it’s a period of short term pain in the pursuit of a long term gain, and that it’s a learning process (so you don’t make the same mistakes again), you’ll be fine. Honestly, you will be.
All of your options for writing off or rescheduling your debt involve some pain. For most people IVAs, even though you are paying something back, involve more pain, more exposure for your family yet produce a broadly similar outcome. So why go through it? The selling of IVAs is, we believe, the next financial miss-selling scandal after PPI. It won’t make so many waves as PPI because there are fewer people effected, but the hurt experienced is far greater. There’s a similar story with debt management plans – we regularly see people who frankly haven’t the faintest idea why they went into them in the first place. Again, some time all this bad advice must come crashing down on those who handed it out. How will that effect you?