What is Credit Action All About?
| Chris Tapp shares his views and thoughts about today’s debt market |
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| Chris Tapp from Credit Action |
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Chris Tapp Credit Action
Chris Tapp Credit Action deals with thousand of cases; helping those in financial difficulties and those who may be struggling to make ends to meet. In an in depth interview with Chris, he shares his views and thoughts about today’s debt market and how you can budget without feeling deprived!
Transcript for Chris Tapp Credit Action:
Q1) What Credit Action is all about encouraging people to think about how they are managing their money. Managing money is something we all have to do it’s absolutely essential and yet so many of us don’t really know what we’re doing when it comes to handling money. If we are not taught it in school and we haven’t really been taught it by our parents then it’s difficult to know what to do because it’s quite complicated often with financial products and understanding banks and loans. Credit action is a charity our aim is just to help people manage their money better, so hopefully they can avoid a lot of the serious debt problems that we’re seeing in the UK at the moment.
Q2) Really the main sort of indicator that someone’s really beginning to struggle with debt are firstly, if there borrowing to pay off existing debts. That’s a really key indicator. Secondly if people are borrowing or using credit to buy essential goods -so if people are doing their food shop with their credit card, because they don’t have the cash available to do it then. That’s obviously a key indicator that things are a problem. More people can’t afford to pay off the debts they’ve already got so people have credit card debts or whatever it might be and they can’t pay them back. They can’t even pay off the minimum on those -that’s a really clear indicator that people are getting into trouble.
Q3) Well people getting into debt problems- we think that the main factors behind that are sometimes people over spending. Sometimes we get people that are just spending more than they should because they can get the credit. Probably the main problem is change of circumstance, so either somebody looses a job, or there’s a divorce or somebody’s ill and unable to work. It’s these types of things which tend to tip people over the edge.
Q4) The most common requests we get are from people who are about to go to University who don’t understand the way student finance works. We get a lot from people who are worried about their money situation at the moment. We also get a lot of people who are just interested in basic money saving tips and these kinds of things so its quite broad the kind of things we get asked.
Q5) If people want to stay in control and curb the amount of debt, we would advise to make sure they are paying off at least the minimum on all their debts and ideally paying off all there debts as they are due. Otherwise the spiral starts because you end up getting extra charges and this type of thing or another. Basic money management is really basic budgeting- people making more, they have got more money coming in than they have going out. It sounds really simple but so often we don’t do that. When we’re managing our money we are not really aware what our financial situation is. It’s about keeping expenditure down, saving money where ever possible. Make sure there is some money saved up for an emergency ,like I just said the biggest problem is a change of circumstance and if people have a little bit of money saved up then those changes of circumstance can be mitigated a little bit. Maximizing income, so if you want to be able to spend that little bit more then you’re going to have to do something to earn it- that’s renting out a spare room you might have in your house, taking on a bit of extra part time work whatever it might be. Q6) We work in a number of different ways; first that we have about 200 volunteers who are around the country. They will work doing courses offering advice to people, maybe just raising awareness of where people can go for help. We also produce a range of guides that people can read so we produce a guide for students. We provide a guide for people going into the army forces where there are some quite particular money management issues. We also can produce material for teachers and for example people who work in prisons; we have a course for them so we produce that kind of material aswell. We have a website a money education website called www.moneybasics.co.uk and people can log on there for completely free and independent advice. We work in a number of different ways however we can get to people basically.
Q7) I think there are lots of places for people to go to get help if they are struggling with debt and often people do not know about them. There are places like the CAB the national debt line or the CCCS who offer completely free and helpful advice. What they often do is work with the person who is struggling with debt and with the creditors to work out a payment plan that they can afford. If there struggling to pay back there debts currently they can put them on what’s called a debt management plan that they can afford, so that means maybe spacing the debts out over a longer period of time. Occasionally getting interest frozen these types of things so there are lots of solutions people can pursue.
Q8) I think the key advice to people who are worried about their situation, whether it is debt or they are just worried about there financial situation in general is to get advice on it. It’s something we are not very good at doing in this country we tend to be very shy about talking about our money. We would much rather talk about our sex lives than talk about our bank accounts. If people want to stay in control of their money, then it’s really important they do bite the bullet and seek advice. You can talk to some one confidentially; you can go to the CAB or the CCCS or come and speak to us at Credit Action completely anonymously. Get free independent advice if you’re worried what you should do.
Q9) Well if people want to make sure the people they are going to go for advice are ok, then the best thing they can do is make sure they are going to someone who is completely independent. Most importantly going to somebody who is free, there are lots of people out there who will offer debt advice money and will do debt management plans and will charge people for it. When you think about that that just doesn’t make any sense- if you are struggling with debt then the last thing you need is to be charged to help you get out of that debt. So if you go to somewhere that is not going to charge and that is completely independent -places like the CAB, the CCCS or even go to your local CAB- they will be able to tell were local free independent money advisers. Something as simple as a Google search on the internet should be able to show you the stuff in your area, but those things are key people that are independent and do not charge you.
Q10) Well we are seeing a huge increase in debt in the UK at the moment. We think that this is because the economy has been built on borrowing. We are in a situation now where it is almost implausible for any body to think about buying a house without taking out a mortgage. If you want to go to Uni now you have to borrow money to do so. So the whole way a money system works is based on people getting into debt because credit cards, store cards loans- these types of things are more freely available as well. It’s just become part of our culture; we all borrow money and that doesn’t have to be a problem, although the amount of debt is going up very quickly. It doesn’t have to be a problem most people cope absolutely fine with that. We think it’s about 5-6 % of people that get into serious difficulty managing that debt. That’s quite a small percentage although we have to remember that percentage is about 300,000 people a year -so its quite large numbers.
Q11) If people do want to get money advice the type of place they can go is they can come on to our website which is www.creditaction.org.uk or our money advice website which is www.moneybasics.co.uk or if they are struggling with debt problem now they can call the CCCS completely free of charge from start to finish on 0800 138 11 11.
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| Thomas
Charles & Co - the Debt Help Specialists |
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