Making Your Debt Review Work – 4 More Steps to a Successful Debt Review
reviewed December 2023
Making Your Debt Review Work
Knowing who your Debt Counsellor is is just the first of many steps you can take to ensure you make a success of the debt review process. Let’s consider another vital part of the process: Your Legal Representative in the process.
Debt review is a legal process. A formal proposal is made by the Debt Counsellor to the courts. The court then looks over the papers and listens to any credit providers who may not be happy with the proposal (this can happen if they feel one of the other creditors is getting all the money or that you have more money that you could pay. In reality creditors normally only oppose out of greed in wanting to settle the debt sooner or to maybe take away an asset to sell).
Not many Debt Counsellors are also attorneys. This means that in most cases a Debt Counsellor will hire an attorney to handle the matter at court (this is totally legitimate). The key is to get a reliable and knowledgeable legal representative. Some attorney firms have started to specialize in debt review matters even having Debt Counsellors on their teams to offer great service.
Since attorneys do not work for free, the NCR have issued a guideline that consumers pay towards legal fees in the second month of the process. This has become an industry norm (though it is not found in the National Credit Act). What then happens is money will be taken from your first payment toward the Debt Counsellors fees and from your second payment to the attorneys.
What will help you make a success of your debt review is to get to know who your attorneys are, where their offices are and who they are. They (and the Debt Counsellor) will produce documents for court about your situation. The court will want to know that (1) you know about the debt review and (2) agree with the plan. For this, they will ask for an affidavit signed by yourself. This is needed before the court matter can get sorted out so you can help speed things along by signing and having commissioned this affidavit. Your attorneys or Debt Counsellor will tell you how to do that.
The key is to do so quickly when asked. This protects you from creditors who might not totally like the plan and want to try other legal means (expensive ones) to try get you to pay more.
Step Two
Know who your attorneys are and sign your court docs as speedily as you can. This will help make a success of your debt review.
Click below to check out the next step
