2013 the year banks told borrowers to hand back the keys?

We help different people with different things, and while most of our debt problem clients face broadly similar reactions from the banks, we think it’s important to post the documents which show a presence of lashings and lashings of stupid. To see the full letter click on the image at the bottom of the post

One such document was received by a client recently from the Irish Civil Service building society, also known as ICS and a subsidiary of Bank of Ireland. It’s no secret that posting these documents makes us highly disliked by the banks,  but if people don’t expose them then the great farce will go unchallenged.

What makes this case interesting is that the bank offered a short term forbearance plan which the client asked them to tweak. Then they turned around and changed their mind and went from ‘we can give you a few months to get your affairs in order’ to ‘sell the house or even abandon it’.

In 2008 to now I have never heard a bank say that walking away (also called jingle …

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Is keeping families ‘in the home’ merely keeping them in the fire?

You must question the morality of ‘keeping people in the home’ when doing so will push them deeper into debt they already can’t afford. The misery of a repossession is not the day you are told you have to move house, rather it is the stress on the way down, the calls, letters, meetings, the apprehension merged with repeated requests to fill in budget forms, and all the time knowing that you are unable to walk away because of our draconian debt laws.

We have 36,500 households in arrears, the greatest attrition is moving from 90-180 days into the 180 days or more unpaid, meaning that the people who go into arrears are not coming back, they remain unable to pay; the figures are hardening in the worst possible sector of the statistics.

Oddly, an increase in the 3-6 month bracket (if the total sum was stagnant) would be a sign of recovery as people paid their way back down the chain towards having a …

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Hand back the keys and walk away.

What we are not saying is that people should try this, this post is merely pointing out that this kind of thing could happen and that a failure of enacting sensible policy soon enough could encourage people to look for solutions such as what we describe here as a means to solving their personal debt issues.

We don’t endorse handing back the keys, we are not suggesting that people do it or consider it, but merely looking at the pro’s and cons of doing so and demonstrating a method whereby a person could potentially try to fool the system while doing so.

The Cons are basically that you lose your home, and assuming that in this case the person is in €100,000 of negative equity then they are also hit with a judgement for the shortfall plus expenses, for the following twelve years that debt can come back to haunt you. Your actual credit may be restored in year seven but that doesn’t mean you are off the hook.

Consider the position of Joe Bloggs, he is deeply in debt, …

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Jingle Mail, Jangle Mail, or ‘Voluntary Possession’.

I had the honour of being a speaker at a MABS seminar on the 21st of May, it was called ‘Keeping a roof over your head’ and it was focused on the issue of housing, and in particular that of the collections/repossession process of Irish Banks. One of the speakers was a solicitor named Colin Daly of the Northside Community Law Centre. He spoke about ‘Voluntary Possession’ which is the process of coming to an agreement with a lender whereby they take your house with your consent (you are not getting thrown out), it isn’t the legal terminology for ‘jingle mail’, ‘jangle mail’ or ‘sending the keys to the bank’ which is a totally different matter, it was a fascinating insight into the process and it is good to know that there are resources such as the NCLC out there for people in difficulty who need legal advice.

There was some information …

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Jingle Mail, Jangle Mail, or 'Voluntary Possession'.

I had the honour of being a speaker at a MABS seminar on the 21st of May, it was called ‘Keeping a roof over your head’ and it was focused on the issue of housing, and in particular that of the collections/repossession process of Irish Banks. One of the speakers was a solicitor named Colin Daly of the Northside Community Law Centre. He spoke about ‘Voluntary Possession’ which is the process of coming to an agreement with a lender whereby they take your house with your consent (you are not getting thrown out), it isn’t the legal terminology for ‘jingle mail’, ‘jangle mail’ or ‘sending the keys to the bank’ which is a totally different matter, it was a fascinating insight into the process and it is good to know that there are resources such as the NCLC out there for people in difficulty who need legal advice.

There was some information …

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