Financial advice for a friend

riiight!

A friend of mine has a banking situation and I'd like to find out what options she has.

At the moment she has two bank accounts with AIB, one in her own name and another a joint account with her estranged husband (not divorced, still living together). The joint account has run into financial difficulty due to debts incurred by the husbands business which closed earlier this year.

Since she was not involved in this business for the past ten years and they are now estranged, she is determined not to pay these debts herself even though she and her husband have each recently received a heavy handed letter from the bank stating that they have 30 days to pay these debts or else her own bank account will be frozen, car loan account will be terminated, ATM/Debit Card and any direct debits will be cancelled.

1. My first question is how liable is she to incur this debt given that she had no direct involvement in the business and maintained her own seperate full time job which paid her wages into her own name account?

2. Through her own account, the car loan was initiated in 2008. She does not have the money to pay off the car in full right now and she fears that future installments will be funneled to the joint account debt instead. Is this a possibility?

GerardKeating

riiight! wrote: »

A friend of mine has a banking situation and I'd like to find out what options she has.

At the moment she has two bank accounts with AIB, one in her own name and another a joint account with her estranged husband (not divorced, still living together). The joint account has run into financial difficulty due to debts incurred by the husbands business which closed earlier this year.

Since she was not involved in this business for the past ten years and they are now estranged, she is determined not to pay these debts herself even though she and her husband have each recently received a heavy handed letter from the bank stating that they have 30 days to pay these debts or else her own bank account will be frozen, car loan account will be terminated, ATM/Debit Card and any direct debits will be cancelled.

1. My first question is how liable is she to incur this debt given that she had no direct involvement in the business and maintained her own seperate full time job which paid her wages into her own name account?

2. Through her own account, the car loan was initiated in 2008. She does not have the money to pay off the car in full right now and she fears that future installments will be funneled to the joint account debt instead. Is this a possibility?

She may have guarantee the joint account, in which case the bank can come calling on her account. They might even try to "raid" the personal account to cover the joint account, you often find obscure small print which gives them such powers.

It is always best to keep business and personal accounts with different bank (and not just different branches of the same bank). It might be prudent to do this now.

If your friend gets her salary paid direct to her AIB personal account, get it changed to another account at another bank first thing Wednesday.

broker2008

Good advice from GerardKeating, get the money out of personal account as they will come calling. The actual liability isn't going to go away though.

unclebill98

Your friend can not claim she is not liable for the debt. She is on the accounts and if she had nothing to do with the business she should have been removed from this.

Again I agree with the above. A bank will not let you run a good account and have a bad debt on another. They can simple add it all into one account with a massive minus figure and pursue both for the balance to be cleared.

matt70iu

riiight! wrote: »

A friend of mine has a banking situation and I'd like to find out what options she has.

At the moment she has two bank accounts with AIB, one in her own name and another a joint account with her estranged husband (not divorced, still living together). The joint account has run into financial difficulty due to debts incurred by the husbands business which closed earlier this year.

Since she was not involved in this business for the past ten years and they are now estranged, she is determined not to pay these debts herself even though she and her husband have each recently received a heavy handed letter from the bank stating that they have 30 days to pay these debts or else her own bank account will be frozen, car loan account will be terminated, ATM/Debit Card and any direct debits will be cancelled.

1. My first question is how liable is she to incur this debt given that she had no direct involvement in the business and maintained her own seperate full time job which paid her wages into her own name account?

2. Through her own account, the car loan was initiated in 2008. She does not have the money to pay off the car in full right now and she fears that future installments will be funneled to the joint account debt instead. Is this a possibility?

I'm afraid "joint" means just that in terms of liability. The Bank aren't going to give a monkeys weather or not she used the account, as her name is still on it.

I ran into trouble when I lost my job a year ago. Got some advice from MABS, who told me that I need to change banks and arrange to have my day to day monies with another bank as my current bank would freeze my account and withdraw banking services as soon as they realized there was a problem.

This is exactly what they did. Keeping my day to day finances with my new Bank, I then wrote to my previous Bank with an offer of payment of the debt. Took a while to hear back from them as you may have guessed and in the mean time, I kept paying what I had offered to pay. They came back and accepted my offer. I'm sure you can come to an arrangement with AIB that will keep you both happy, best thing to do is talk and communicate, wish you the best of luck!

riiight!

Thank you for all the advice. It's much appreciated