Recovery and Insolvency Services

Debt Arrangement Schemes - a cautionary tale

23/07/2014 by Webmaster

A DAS is more likely to fail than be completed! Debtors need to be told that at the outset - but who is warning them? 3.1% of debt payment plans fail every quarter!

Failure is a sobering thought if you are embarking on a Debt Payment Plan. The average time people expect to take to pay off their debts (in full) when then enter the Scottish Goverment's flagship debt management tool is 6.5 years. If that is you, then be aware than the most likely outcome is that your scheme will fail.

If 3.1% of schemes fail each quarter then by the time 6.5 years have passed then 56% will have gone down the tubes. The money paid is perhaps not entirely wasted - the creditors will hopefully have got a dividend - but that majority of debtors will be back struggling to make payments or looking at a trust deed or sequestration to obtain debt relief. If only they had gone there first?

Minister Fergus Ewing says - as he says every quarter - “It is gratifying to see an increased uptake on the DAS debt payment programme this quarter”. There have been so many financial misselling scandals recently - lets hope that in years to come we aren't looking back at the DAS scheme in that way.

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