Seminar gives advice to people in debt

Almost 350 people weighed down with debt worries were yesterday given step-by-step advice, not only on how to address their financial worries, but also to stop those worries affecting their mental health.

The “Bouncing Back” seminar in Cork City was one of a series which has been organised by New Beginnings, the organisation of professionals set up to help people facing debts.

The team of lawyers and financial experts gave a breakdown of the approaches taken by banks and financial institutions when people fall into arrears, the options open to those people both in the short and long term and the pitfalls of those options and also a detailed breakdown of the new personal insolvency legislation.

“What we are going to find in the next six months, and over the next number of years, is a move, we hope, on the part of the banks to allow ordinary people return to solvency, because there can be no doubt that unless all of us ordinary people are able to pay our debts as they fall due, this country cannot recover,” Ross Maguire, a barrister and one of the founders of New Beginnings, told listeners at a packed ballroom in the Metropole Hotel.

“It is incumbent on us all that we demand our people are returned to solvency. I hope the banks are getting that message and over the next 18 months all of us will have an opportunity to return to economic normality,” he added.

The seminar was also addressed by psychologist Shane Martin who said people losing their homes and businesses might feel like there is no way out.

He talked in detail about the methods people can use to try to maintain their mental health through the stress of indebtedness.