- unless you can afford to make this month’s payment without borrowing again, cancel the CPA to the lender at your bank. Otherwise the lender may take the money and you will be in a mess.
- read the Stop making payments? section in Payday loan refunds when last loan not repaid. If you want to offer a lower affordable amount, add a sentence to your complaint letter saying this.
- if you have a lot of borrowing at the moment, read Escape from the payday loan trap which looks at how a debt management plan can help you.
Don’t skip this bit or a debt collector may go to court. It is a good idea to carry on making payments to the debt collector if they are affordable.
You should never have given me these unaffordable loans. I am asking you to refund the interest and any charges I paid, plus statutory interest, and to delete any negative information from my credit record.
[delete this sentence if you know what all your loans were.] I know the difficulties your loans have caused me but I no longer have all the loan details. Please send me a list, showing for each loan when it was taken out, how much interest and charges you added and what I repaid – this will enable me to assess any refund you offer me.
[delete this sentence if none of your loans were sold.]If a loan was later sold to a debt collector, please inform me of the date of sale and the name of the debt collector.
[Only put this bit in if some of your loans were more than 6 years old. This explains why you haven’t complained before. It ‘s only an example, don’t copy it, c hange it so it covers what happened to you !] [I didn’t know that the lender was supposed to check that I could repay the loan without 
having to borrow more. ]
The lender should reply to your complaint within 8 weeks from when you send the email, not when they acknowledge it. Make a note in your diary for 8 weeks time and chase the lender up if you don’t get a reply.
I only found out in 2020 when I saw a newspaper article in the Sun/an advert on Facebook for payday loan refunds/a friend said they had made a complaint/whatever
They may send the list of loans sooner, and then later send the response to the complaint, so don’t be surprised if you get sent info on the loans but nothing about your request for a refund.
Don’t be surprised if you have to wait until the end of the 8 weeks to get response. A lot of lenders are really slow.
If your loan was sold to a debt collector you still complain to the original lender but also tell the debt collector that you are disputing the debt
When you get your loan information, you can send in more details about your complaint if you want. You don’t have to do this, your complaint has already begun and the lender has to reply.
I don’t know if many lenders actually read what you send them. But it’s easy to do – you don’t need to calculate what refund you should get or quote laws.
Paying you each month left me with too little money so I had to keep borrowing to get through the next month.
[ Include the following details if you know them, but if they varied a lot miss this out My living expenses were roughly: rent/mortgage ?x. Council tax ?x. Utilities and bills ?x. Transport costs ?x. Clothes ?x. Food, toiletries etc ?x. Child expenses ?x Other debt repayments ?x. Total ?x per month.]
