Another week on, and perhaps the highlight for me (outside of the insolvency world) was to be at the Millenium Stadium on Saturday to see my beloved Welsh Rugby team complete the Grand Slam for the second time in four years! The atmosphere in the stadium was absolutely electric, and the singing was tremendous in traditional Welsh form. It is estimated that over 250,000 people were in Cardiff for the game, which is almost the same amount as our population!

Now turning to the world of insolvency, there has been much comment this week about the effect of the transfer of appointments from Debtmatters to Grant Thornton and Payplan. I have limited personal knowledge of the way Debtmatters was run, or the standard of work carried out, but with both incoming firms taking the step to vary all cases, this leads us to assume that there may be inefficiencies in the old system which need to be dealt with - for the benefit of both debtor and creditors. At at time when our profession is under such scrutiny - particularly with regard to fee income - this attention is less than favourable.

My own view is that more IVA portfolios will be sold, as the larger “factory” based companies will struggle to maintain their cost bases on the very significant drop in fee income imposed by creditors over the last few months. We are all feeling this badly, but the stronger, more specialist firms may be sufficiently capitalised and efficiently run to withstand such pressure. Let’s hope so!

What would be helpful would be if creditors could agree on the basis of fees. I am now seeing at least six different fee structures being imposed by creditor representatives, which often conflict - it is as if the voting representatives are all playing tag with each other and trying to say theirs is better than the others. Can we please get to the stage where we are either going with fixed fees or percentage based realisations? Either is fine in my book - but we have to be paid a reasonable rate for the lower end cases to justify continuing to take them on. This either has to be funded on the basis of agreed fixed costs - or the upper benchmark on fees has to be removed.

A personal triumph this week was to receive a final settlement for poster MikeS from the forum who has been a client of mine since the end of last year. Initially referred to me as an IVA, it soon became apparant that Mike’s interests were best served by the offering of an informal settlement - something that I do not do a lot of, but Mike was such a nice guy (and he brought Jaffa Cakes!) it just felt the right thing to do. One of my colleagues, Hywel Casling, deserves full credit for achieving the settlement, which took some time (as they always do!) to broker - simply because finding a decision maker is not easy when you are offering an informal settlement. Mike sold his family home to enable monies to be made available, but is now happily living with his family in a nice rented property, and is concentrating on building his business back up as he now feels he is directly benefitting from those efforts. Well done to Mike and all others who do not give up hope of eventually getting there!

I cannot believe it is Easter already - it only seems 5 minutes since Christmas, and isn’t it early this year! We have cold weather and snow predicted for the holiday weekend in Wales, so I shall be curling up with some chick-flicks and relaxing - checking the forum occasionally of course. I have a creditors meeting on Good Friday (we take Monday and Tuesday off instead!) for a very special client who is very worried about his position at the moment, so if anyone is reading this over the next few days, please send positive thoughts for him - and especially his wife who is not doing an IVA but is also very worried. If only some of the creditors could see the stress they put some people through, they might think twice about lending the money in the first place - but I guess we do have to measure irresponsibility in borrowing as well as lending.

Looking foward to the Frugal Friends meet in Birmingham in a week or so - it seems that there are going to be a few members there. It will be great to put names to faces, actually meet some of my own clients, and check out whether my thought pictures of some of the regular forum posters bear any resemblance. I feel that I really know Skippy and Aguise so well, as they have been posting on the forum for longer than me, so it should be a good night. And I am contributing to the food and drink - so make sure you bring appetities if you are attending.

My summary is a little late this week, due to having been in Dublin for a long weekend watching my beloved Wales win the Triple Crown. It is a while since I was last in Dublin, and I had quite forgotten what a lovely city it is, and how British it still feels with a very European edge. As I can never leave work alone when I am away, I popped into their version of the Citizen’s Advice Bureau to find that there is practically no debt advisory information at all. Debt solutions are generally worked out with creditors on an informal basis - with no legal protection - and bankruptcy is extremely cumbersome and expensive, with a 12 year discharge period, and whilst there were over 47,000 bankruptcies in the UK in 2005, in the Irish Republic there were only 9! Maybe they are just a little better at paying their creditors over there!

Back at base we have actually had our first rejected IVA for over 6 months, which I am absolutely smarting over as it is a lump sum offer from a good remortgage which is giving creditors nearly 60p in the £ returned within three months. One particular creditor has refused to accept the offer on the basis that her husband’s equity has not been included, however they have not been married that long and the debts were incurred before they were in a relationship. These people are honest and hardworking, and were prepared to increase their exposure to secured lending in order to make a very sensible offer of repayment to their creditors, which is vastly reduced under bankruptcy proceedings. My client will now most likely proceed with the remortgage, and retain the money to hand over to the Trustee once she has petitioned for her bankruptcy, thus resulting in over £6,000 being paid to the government in fees and charges, and perhaps another £8,000 being paid to a Trustee for the task of agreeing and paying creditor claims. Does this actually make any sense to anybody?

I have also been meeting again with many mortgage brokers this week, who are reporting that this is the flattest they have seen the housing and lending markets for a number of years. People coming out of fixed rate deals are being shocked at the level their mortgage payments are going up by, and a client of mine who bought a property two years ago at almost 100% LTV has seen an increase in payments of over £250, and cannot mortgage due to a lack of equity. It is fair to say that most people, including insolvency practitioners, did not see this credit crunch coming two years ago, and creditors simply have to be flexible when it comes to variation applications, from people who continue to strive to repay as much as they can.

This week we have also seen the suggestion that bankruptcy advertsing be stopped - or limited to just the London Gazette, which only sad people like me actually read! I have mixed feelings on this point. Firstly, if we go back to the reasons why bankruptcy was actually publically advertised in the first place then there clearly is no need to draw creditors attention to the fact given our sophisticated modern day communication systems. Secondly, I feel that the majority of people I see actually want to pay their creditors back, and will still feel a stigma about bankruptcy proceedings whether they are advertised or not. I have not read the budget in any great depth today, but my thoughts are that the provisions reported in the Telegraph the other day have been miscontrued, and actually relate to lesser forms of advertising used by IPs such as the payment of dividends and the calling of annual meetings, and in any case such new provisions are not anticipated to be introduced until 2009.

With the storms we have encountered over the last couple of days, it has made me think about the risks people in debt take in being underinsured - for buildings, contents and even life insurance. Have you ever really costed how much it would take to replace every item of furniture, electrical appliance, and item of clothing in your house. According to my husband, replacing my clothing would equate to more than the national debt - but this could easily run into £40,000 or £50,000. Contents and life insurance are relatively cheap, so I would urge all readers to relook at their policies and make sure that you have ample cover - taking advice from an IFA if necessary.

Hope the weather in your area is better than in South Wales, where the fir trees in my garden look as if they are about to fall into my conservatory.

Hi All

Just wanted to say that over the next few months I will be providing a running commentary of interesting things I pick up along my travels as an Insolvency Practitioner in practice. I will try and keep my postings topical and all comments will be based upon my opinions and not necessarily representative of the profession as a whole.

So for this week I found out that leading creditors representative TIX is reporting a 20% reduction in IVAs on last years figures over the last four months. This correlates with the introduction of their new protocol in September 2007, which has now largely been ratified by the joint BBA/BERR IVA protocol which as introduced on 1 February 2008. With bankrutpcy numbers remaining steady, I can only assume that people entering into Debt Management Plans is on on the increase - and a few of the DMP companies I work with have confirmed that they are busier than ever.

A couple of meetings I have had in my office this week with clients has reinforced the need to meet with self-employed clients on a face to face basis, which is actually a requirement under our rules of operation in any case, but one which I feel some Insolvency Practitioners are not abiding by. Self-employed cases bring many complexities, such as the calculation of tax claims, preparation of meaningul trading projections, and simply establishing whether there is a profitable business beind the client. If you are self-employed and your IP says there is no need to meet, I would look for someone who will - as you will need their support over a long time.

We are still seeing rejections from MBNA and Link Financial (who are a company which buys MBNA debt). I have one case at the moment which is at present rejected, but my staff are furiously trying to get additional votes from other creditors to enable this to be accepted. The offer is a good one, and my clients has made it clear that if the IVA is not accepted then she will have no hesitation to declare herself bankrupt. In my practice we never let a client go without a big fight, and we find things like this challenging as they enable us to interact with creditors and understand their reasons for objection. In this particular case, most of the debts are old and have been assigned or are with Debt Collection companies, so we are not dealing with our usual contacts within the creditor representatives.

I am attending a meeting tomorrow convened by a leading Debt Mangement Company who are trying to improve awareness of the operability of DMPs to mortgage brokers in Newport. So it will be interesting to chat to the mortgage industry to see how they feel things are at present and if there is any sign of the markets improving. With many people due to receive stiff increases on their mortgage payments over the next 12 months as they move from fixed to variable rates, we will have to carefully examine how to avoid this when presenting IVA proposals into the future.

That’s all for now, but please look at my blogs regularly as I hope to keep them updated with news and interesting comment.