Consumers are more open to the idea of filing for bankruptcy, an industry expert has indicated.
According to Duncan Philp, senior consultant for Macbeth Currie, the rising popularity of borrowing has led to Britons becoming less concerned about becoming insolvent should they find themselves unable to handle their day-to-day finances and make repayments on loans. He added that a rising number of borrowers are "loading up credit cards" due to the increasing availability of the lending product.
He said: "Bankruptcy, whether from a business' or an individual's point of view, does not have the same fear or the stigma attached to it. If you go back ten years or so everybody would have been terrified to have been made bankrupt. Now it just seems to be a modern phenomenon that people are perfectly happy to go through and a few years down the line they're back with money again".
The consultant added that consequently a lot of young people view having previously filed for bankruptcy as "a badge on their collar" when they are looking to go into business. In turn, he reported that as there are an "awful lot of small businesses going out of business almost on a weekly basis", this consequently reflects on consumers' personal financial situations.
As a result, Mr Philp suggested that consumers do not take enough time to carry out sufficient research into what product might be best for them when they look to borrow money. "There's an awful lot of information about but from my experience people don't tend to seek it out", he pointed out.
These sentiments were also echoed by an independent financial adviser earlier this week. Paul White, consultant with Belgravia Insurance Consultants, suggested that declaring oneself unable to afford loan repayments was becoming evermore easy to do as Britain takes a similar approach to lending as adopted in the United States.
The fall in the "stigma" around bankruptcy was also attributed to rising popularity of taking individual voluntary arrangements, many of which are now being processed either online or over the telephone. He said: "If it can be done remotely then it's really more of a streamlined process rather than someone sitting down face to face".
Earlier this year those Britons who opted for bad credit loans, which may include Britons who have filed for insolvency and those who have a negative credit report, have said that they could eventually be able to access more competitively priced borrowing in the future. James Cotton, spokesperson for London & Country Mortgages, told the Times that if borrowers are able to keep up with monthly repayments over the term of their lending "the chances are that you could have repaired your credit record sufficiently to take out a prime deal next time".
Mr Cotton's comments follow a study carried out by GMAC-RFC which indicated that about 75 per cent of Britons with a sub-prime mortgage deal are between the ages of 35 and 54. This figure was attributed to those in this age bracket having a damaged financial history report as a result of missing credit card repayments, going through a divorce or filing for bankruptcy.
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