Excessive time to default.

[Nottingham2013]

Hi,

I am posting on behalf of a friend, she had a current account many years ago and it had an overdraft on it. She exceeded the overdraft and just let it run with charges accumulating ect, I've had a look at it for her and they defaulted her 14 months after the account initially fell into arrears. There were no payments made, I was under the impression that defaults had to be placed maximum 6 months after the account first falls into arrears. Does she have a case to ask them to change the default date to within the 6 month period? It would make the world of difference to her if the default would come off 8 months earlier.

[FlamingParrot]

Re: Excessive time to default.

The problem with overdrafts is that it can be difficult to establish when you have actually defaulted on them, unlike loans and credit cards, you don't have a set payment date every month, you can leave your account overdrawn for months without making payments, then go back to using it. I did just that, with a business account without an overdraft, which went overdrawn with charges imposed by the bank. Since I didn't have an O/D facility, I stupidly thought that, if I withdrew most of the money, the bank couldn't take any more in charges, however, they just carried on applying them. I didn't pay anything into the account for around nine months, yet I never got defaulted - years later I'm still using the account. :grin:

It works both ways, if you don't intend to use the account and/or can't pay anything into it and you'll end up being defaulted anyway, you'd rather they did it sooner rather than later; for me it worked out well not to have been defaulted. :decision:

You may want to look at section 15 of the ICO Guidance Notes, which refers to current accounts: http://ico.org.uk/~/media/documents/...%20%20doc.ashx

It all depends on when the bank decided to close the account and/or recall the overdraft.

She's got nothing to lose by requesting the date to be changed... :thumb: