Financial Difficulty

Halifax is committed to helping customers find a way forward if they are struggling with their finances. 
 
We would normally regard a customer to be in financial difficulty if their income is not enough to meet their financial commitments and reasonable living expenses. 
 
Our trained advisors will treat you sympathetically and positively and will work with you to help you to review your financial situation.

We will:

• Discuss with you the difficulties you are experiencing repaying your debts, either if you raise your concerns with us, or we identify a problem. We can communicate with you face to face, by phone or in writing.
• Establish the extent of your financial difficulties. This may involve completing an income and expenditure statement with you.
• Work with you to assess your repayment capability taking into account what you owe other providers of credit and your priority payments, such as mortgage, rent, council tax, child support payments and utility bills, and reasonable day to day expenditure.
• Develop a plan with you, confirm any arrangement in writing and keep to what we have agreed. Solutions may include:
  • a review of your regular payments and the dates you make them. We may suggest cancelling some if we think you are unable to afford them and your position will be made worse by including charges if they are repeatedly returned unpaid;
  • advice on budgeting and managing your money;
  • arranging regular payments to reduce your debt;
  • restructuring your repayments and in some cases reviewing the interest and fees you are being charged for an agreed period;
  • re-financing your borrowing onto a new loan in order to make the repayments manageable.
• Advise you of free money advice services if you have debts with other providers.
• Deal directly with a debt advice agency, provided it is a fair distribution of available income in line with the amount owed to each of your providers of credit.
• Suspend activities to collect arrears on your account for up to 30 days where we have been advised by a not-for-profit debt advice agency that you are in a serious discussion with them about a draft debt repayment plan.
• Review agreed repayment plans on a regular basis, at least every 12 months. We will only change repayments at the end of the agreed period or if there is a material change in your circumstances.
• Only proceed with debt recovery procedures where we are unable to agree a repayment plan with you, for example, if you only have a token amount available to repay your debts, or you do not co-operate with us. Lack of co-operation includes not responding to our attempts to contact you, failing to adhere to an agreed repayment plan  and unreasonable demands such as asking us to write off the debt or repay it over a very long period of time even though you are able to afford reasonable repayments.

What you can do:

• Tell us as soon as you think you may be in financial difficulty, for example if a reduction in your income will mean that you will not be able to make future repayments or you are falling behind with payments to other providers of credit.
• Take steps to understand how and when you spend money and develop a budget planner.
• Work with us, for example, by providing accurate details of your income and expenditure and the amount you owe to creditors, to enable us to accurately assess the extent of your financial difficulty.
• Seek the help of not-for-profit debt advice agencies where you have a number of credit providers.
• Contact us quickly if we try to contact you.
• Keep to the repayment plan we make with you or tell us as soon as possible of any changes that may affect the arrangement.
• Stay in touch with us and tell us how things are going.