Credit Card Debt – Wipe Out Your Credit Card Debt Legally

With so many people looking for ways to get a handle on their credit card debt as their incomes are shrinking or in many cases going away completely there are advertisements on the television promising you that there are legal ways to write off your credit card debt. The question is, are there really legal a ways to do this and leave you free of the worry of collection agencies and court actions? The truth is that under UK laws that are designed to protect the consumer there are ways to get rid of your credit card debt without getting in legal trouble.

The two methods that are legal in the UK to dispose your credit card debt are to challenge the contract you signed when you took out the loan or accepted the credit cards and the Individual Voluntary Agreement.

Each of these can get rid of your debt equally well, but only one of them can leave you with no payments right from the start however if you use both methods together in a very short time you can totally wipe out your credit card debt once and for all.

According to the Consumer Credit Act of 1974 as it was revised in 2006 there was a section pulled out that any credit agreement that was signed after the 6th of April 2007 must include the prescribed terms in the contract.

These terms include the size of the loan or in the cases of a credit card, the credit limit plus the interest rate and certain other information relating to the credit agreement. The contract also had to be signed by both the borrower and the lender.

If you ask your lender or the company who bought the debt for a copy of the original agreement they must be able to produce it. This is where many of the companies who buy debts have a problem, when they buy debts; they tend to buy them in bulk lots and generally do not take too much time to worry about the paperwork. They buy the debts at a fraction of the face value and then try to get you to pay full price for them.

According to UK law if they cannot produce the original paperwork, they cannot enforce the debt and you do not have to pay the debt, not even a court of law would side with the lender. If they do have the document you need to look it over, because if it does not have all of the required information it may still not be enforceable and you can still walk away with no credit card debt.

The other way the laws in the UK allow you to wipe out your credit card debt is to go to an Insolvency Practitioner and set up an IVA. The IP will sit you down and work out your budget to see what you have coming in compared to what you have going out. He will then contact your creditors and hammer out an agreement with them that can wipe out up to 75% of your credit card debt in one fell swoop.

You will still have to make a payment but it will be significantly lower than the sum of all your credit card payments and the interest rate will be as much as half of what you were paying. The plan calls for you to be debt free in 5 years or 6 in Scotland. If you use both of these methods you can actually reduce your total credit card debt to as little as 10% of your original debt and pay the rest off in no time at all.