The costs of starting an IVA might vary from one company to the other. You have to pay attention to a very important thing: the company should not charge you at all before the proposal is signed by your creditors. There is no one who can guarantee that the IVA proposal will be signed by your creditors, so you should not pay anything before they agreed with the proposal.

This was the most important issue. There are several ways you can pay your Insolvency Practitioner: you might be charged right after the proposal was signed, there is a chance that you will have to pay the fee right after the proposal is signed. Another option would be that the fee is divided into equal sums and will be added to your monthly payments. There are many companies; you can choose the one that fits you best. If you consider that you would like to pay the fee at once that you should talk to your Insolvency Practitioner, but if you would like to pay it along with your monthly payments you might be able to arrange that too. But do not forget: the most important thing is that you choose a company which won’t charge you with upfront fees!

Let us talk about in more detail what exactly are you paying for. Now I will discuss what an Insolvency Practitioner has to do in order to obtain you the arrangement. First of all he has to prepare the proposal, in this case he will work with you, and you will have to discuss everything in detail, so he could come up with a proposal which will satisfy you. Next, he has to gather all the information required, regarding your creditors, the total sum of money you owe to each and every creditor and so on. Then he has to prepare and file the Nominee’s report. After all this is done, he will send the proposal to all your creditors and finally he will hold a creditor’s meeting, where your creditors decide if they agree or not on the proposal. You can see now that your Insolvency Practitioner has hard work to do even from the beginning! And he is not done yet: after the proposal is signed, he will have to keep in touch both with you and your creditors until the IVA is over.

Now that you know what you are paying for, let us see the documents required. It comes almost natural that you will have to complete a form when you decide on an IVA and contact an Insolvency Practitioner. Besides the form you will have to provide a list of documents. Note that I will list here the usually required documentation, there might be slight variations. You will have to provide a property evaluation. For this you can easily ask a real estate agent, or if the Insolvency Practitioner agrees, you can check the house prices from your area in a newspaper. Of course, the ideal thing would be to ask a real estate agent. You will have to provide a mortgage statement, at least three months pay slips. It would be best if you give the pay slips of three consecutive months, and you might want to take with you your spouse’s pay slips too, even your spouse has no debts. This way the Insolvency Practitioner and your creditors will see your monthly income, and they might lower or raise your monthly payments. You will need an endowment policy surrender value, for this you will have to ask your insurance company and ask them to give the data to you in written form. And of course you will need a creditor’s letter. You will have to present a letter from each and every creditor; the letter should state clearly the amount you owe and your account or reference number. As a last thing, you should write a document in which you give a personal history on how you ended up in a situation like this. Here you should mention everything that led to your difficult financial situation: beginning with a longer illness and ending with temporary unemployment. You should give many facts, because the creditors can rely on identifiable reasons.

Now you know everything about the fees and documents needed for an IVA, all you have to do is contact an Insolvency Practitioner and ask for the details. Only an Insolvency Practitioner can fill you in with every detail you need to know starting from the postage stamp and ending with the amount you will have to pay every month. By this I do not mean that this information are not reliable, but to avoid any misunderstandings, contact an Insolvency Practitioner.

You already know what to look for, so find yourself a good company, which will handle your debt problems. But do not forget: do not accept to pay any upfront fees! Pay the Insolvency Practitioner only after the proposal is signed. And start to prepare the documentation as early as you can in order to be prepared!