When you are having debt problems, one of the things that it\’s a good idea to get debt advice on is County Court Judgements. This is what can be issued against you if you do not keep up with the repayments on your debt and you do not enter in to any other sort of arrangement with your creditors.
What is a County Court Judgement?
Once you have been declared in default on your debt, a CCJ (County Court Judgement) can be issued against you. This is an order from the court, telling you to keep repaying the debt to your creditors. If you disobey the order then there are a number of further steps that can be taken. It is at this point, for example, that it is possible for bailiffs to get involved.
How do CCJs Work?
For more information on how CCJs work it is recommended that you contact a company which is offering free debt advice. It\’s not only advice on debt that you owe, they\’ll also be able to elucidate these kinds of legal matters. The process will be gone through in simple terms here though.
The first thing that is going to have to happen of course is that you are going to have to miss some payments on your debt. Once you have missed between 3 and 6 payments, that is the time when most creditors will feel that you no longer intend to repay the debt and they will take a step towards legal action.
However many payments you have missed though, they cannot go straight to the court so you will get some notice still. That notice is going to come in the form of a Default Notice. It will usually give you 1 or 2 weeks in order to pay off the debt in full, or else legal action will be taken.
Once the Default Notice has been issued, and the time you have been given to repay the debt has run out, then your creditor can petition the court for a CCJ. At that point you will get another document, this time from the court. You will have to fill in details of your budget, and you will also have the chance to be able to dispute how much you owe them.
If the court finds that you do owe your creditor money then they will order you to pay it back. However, crucially, you will only have to repay what you can afford each month from your disposable income. That is why you will have had to provide details of your income for the court to examine, so they could determine how much you should have to pay.
What this means, that the court will not expect you to pay any more than you can realistically afford, is that creditors are usually willing to negotiate before that. If you offer them a reduced amount before the CCJ is issued, they\’ll probably accept if they think they won\’t get any more with a CCJ. That\’s why the debt management plans proposed by the advisers at companies offering free debt advice usually work.
If you do not keep up with payments on a CCJ issued against you though then there are a number of options that the court will have in order to enforce the payment. It is at this point, for example, that bailiffs can get involved. That is only one option though, there are also lots of other possibilities. None of them good though.
To find some additional advice on ways to use debt advice, visit the place where author Matthew Jackson also frequently is found writing at: http://www.debtadvice.net.
