What happens next?

Assuming that you request the proof that we suggest you should ask for, the chances are that the lender will not play ball.

They may send you partial documentation to support their claim, or none.

Eventually they will probably refer your file to their solicitor or their own litigation department. Then you'll start to receive letters from their lawyer or litigation department instead. Like the lender's letters, these letters will threaten to take you to court unless you pay up, get on the phone or make a settlement offer. They usually give you seven days.

We know of one repossessee who has received 16 letters - each of which threatened to take him to court within seven days (from Dibb Lupton Alsop). At the time of writing, he has not received a summons.

Less often, lenders refer cases to debt collection agencies or threaten to send debt collectors around to deal with you.

Your challenge is to learn to live with these threats and to understand that they don't actually mean anything in themselves.

Simply reply to these letters the way you should have replied to the others: by politely requesting documentation to prove the lender's claim.

Here is the minimum you should be asking for:

• Copies of two valuations relating to sale of the repossessed property
• MIG policy (if you had a MIG policy)
• Terms and conditions of the MIG policy (if you had a MIG policy)
• Copy of marketing material shown to me at the time you bought the MIG
• Endowment policy (if you had an endowment)
• Terms and conditions of the endowment policy (if you had a endowment)
• Copy of marketing material shown to me at the time you bought the endowment
• Mortgage deed
• Terms and conditions of the actual mortgage you bought as applicable to the mortgage at the time you bought it
• Copy of marketing material shown to me at the time I bought the mortgage
• Money Judegement Order
• Records and notes of all telephone conversations relating to the sale of the property after repossession
• Copy of notification letter(s) of repossession sale.
• Add a paragraph reserving the right to request and see any other documents as required when you have recieved all of this this material and assessed it.

Ignore the threats of court and of debt collectors. Debt collectors can't do anything until the lender has won its case in court. And as we have said elsewhere, your lender is sending out all these letters because court is the last place it wants to go.

If the lender does send receipts or invoices for each item of expenditure, politely thank them in writing. Check them. Do they tally with what the lender has said? If you can afford to pay them, pay them. If you can't afford to pay all of it, offer them a one-off settlement. Never, ever agree a monthly payment plan. If you can't afford to pay them at all, point out to them that you have no spare money, then sit back and wait for the next letter.

You don't need to do anything more than write polite replies unless you receive a summons.

If - and it is a big "if" - you receive a summons, reply with an offer of settlement - whatever you have spare - unless you think they sold the property too cheaply or acted improperly in other ways (see the rest of this site for examples and more detail).

If you do think they sold the property too cheaply or acted wrongly, reply with a defence and a negligence counterclaim. Your solicitor will give you more details about this or you can read the recommended books in our Who Helps? section.

But the chances are that you won't receive a summons. We've seen case after case where the customer received seven-day warnings but no writ (summons) was ever issued.

You've got to learn to live with this.

Only you can estimate whether you are likely to receive a summons. Even your lender does not know if it will apply for one when it threatens to issue one. It actually depends on whether you've left a paper trail showing your income and assets. That paper trail will have been created by your mobile phone and loan applications. If your paper trail suggests you have plenty of disposable income and if you seem unlikely to put up any resistance in court, then you are more likely to receive a summons.

We often receive emails from repossessees who find all this difficult to believe. They think they should tell their lender that it appears to have been charged twice as much in estate agents' fees than is normal and how half the lenders' costs remain unexplained or unverifiable. They think that challenging their lender over specific fees will frighten the lender into not pursuing its shortfall claim.

Here is an example of how we try to explain it, taken from a real email to a repossessee being chased by Abbey National's lawyer Dibb Lupton Alsop.

One of the things you must *not* do is tell DLA exactly what it is you have doubts about. If you do this they are very likely to respond by saying "OK, we'll knock £10,000 off our claim, so you owe us £15,000 (or whatever) instead. Pay up or go to court."

Instead, keep politely requesting documented proof of the lender's costs and its actions over the sale.

Your aim should be to get them to feel that they are not getting anywhere with you... but the reason they are not getting anywhere with you should be that *they* are refusing to supply you with the information you have asked for in order for you to help them (by allowing you to verify the real debt so that you can make arrangements to pay it). Once you've got to this situation your lender's choice are effectively reduced to these:

a) take you to court, or
b) give up (they won't tell you that they are giving up), or
c) try to get you on the phone so they can work you over without putting anything in writing, or
d) send you more variations of their existing letters.

You should want them to go for choices b), c) (provided you resist the temptation to get on the phone with them) or d) (which is effectively the same as b) (if rather more stressful).

If c) fails (ie, if you don't respond to requests to phone them) they will eventually have only choice a) left. But that is where their problems really begin, because, while issuing a summons is easy, it locks them into a process where a key thing the judge will want to see before agreeing to hold the actual hearing is proof that the two of you fully cooperated in trying to sort out the whole problem before *they* resorted to court. Cooperation, which - quite clearly - they won't have provided. Oh dear. Customer 1, lender 0.

Lenders know this but will never admit it. You are not supposed to know this, which is why the shortfall recovery process strikes terror into the hearts of ordinary people.

Does this make sense?