My Paragon debt story

This is my story of how Paragon finance have turned a £4200 debt into a £25,000 debt that gets bigger every month. I'm not alone, there are many similar stories on the Internet.

12 years ago in 1996, I took an unsecured loan with Universal Credit (at that time part of TSB). I wanted to borrow £3700, the condition of the loan was I paid off an existing car loan with Abbey National which stood at £2300. The total borrowed was £6000 with monthly payments of £142.

All was well for three and a half years until I lost my job and couldn't afford the payments. CAB (Citizens Advice) negotiated with them on my behalf and the interest was frozen, I was paying reduced amounts each month. At this point my balance owed was £4212.47. My reduced payments started at £1 and quickly increased to £10 and then £20.

Paragon brought Universal Credit for £25million from the Lloyds TSB group and transferred the debt into their own name. I received a letter saying if I continued to pay the agreed amount by direct debit they would update my credit file to say the account was up to date. Nothing was mentioned about interest. At this point Paragon agreed to my monthly payments of £20 after sending an income and expenditure form.
On checking my credit file I discovered they had actually removed the debt and have never entered anything about it since.

Another couple of years went by, I was now paying £145 a month. At this point I requested a statement to see how much I owed. Paragon are not keen on giving you a balance and after several calls they eventually agreed to supply this for £25.

The statement arrived and I was very shocked to discover they had added interest back to the point when CAB had negotiated for the interest to be frozen. At that point I had owed £4212 with the interest I now owed over £12,000 and the monthly interest was more than my £145 was covering. The debt was rising each month.

At this point I realised I had to do something about the debt, so increased my payments to £176 in the hope of actually reducing the debt.

Paragon phoned me in Juky 2007 asking for increased payments, They said I had to pay £205 a month. I agreed to this on the condition they reduced the interest and didn't keep asking for higher payments. They sent a letter saying they would consider reducing the interest after 3 months of payments. I increased my payments to £215 (more than they had asked for) and never received confirmation they had reduced the interest.

Six months later they called asking for more each month. They constantly refuse to say how much interest they are charging. My balance now stands at over £13,600, that's after all the payments I have made which add up to £15,227.27. If I paid off the debt today I would have paid £28,227. , that's a whopping £22,000 interest!

This debt has already been with me for 12 years, I have already paid the debt about 3 times over and still owe nearly 3 times what the debt stood at when Paragon took it over.

In 1999 I had debts with several other lenders, all of these froze the interest and accepted reduced payments for the first couple of years. All but Paragon have since been paid in full. Paragon would also have been paid off in full many years ago if they hadn't added all the interest.