We will not ask you what you owe. We will tell you what happens to your house.

No, and the assumption that you will is one of the reasons people delay getting help until their position is worse. Start with the scale: in a recent month there were 674 bankruptcies in England and Wales against 3,879 debt relief orders and 7,318 individual voluntary arrangements. Bankruptcy is the smallest of the three routes by a wide margin. Within bankruptcy, the home is protected by two provisions that most people have never heard of. The first is a threshold: where a trustee applies to the court for an order for sale, for possession, or for a charge over a dwelling house, the court must dismiss the application if the value of the interest is below £1,000. Not may — must. And in working out that value the court is required to disregard the secured lending, any other party’s interest, and the reasonable costs of sale, so the figure is a good deal lower than people expect. The second is time: the bankrupt’s interest in the home ceases to be part of the estate and revests automatically after three years unless the trustee has realised it, applied to the court, or agreed terms. In practice the commonest outcome is neither a forced sale nor a windfall: it is a family member or the other owner buying the trustee’s interest, and where competing offers are equal the published policy expressly favours an offer from or on behalf of an occupier. What decides all of it is the valuation, and that is the one part of this we can help with.

Because it is a criminal offence for us to do so, and because you would be worse off if we did. Giving advice to a borrower about the liquidation of a debt is a regulated activity. The regulator’s own guidance confirms that this covers the full range — rescheduling, suspending payments, settling at a reduced sum, and discharge through bankruptcy, a voluntary arrangement or a debt relief order. Carrying on a regulated activity without authorisation is an offence under the Financial Services and Markets Act carrying up to two years’ imprisonment. Fraser Bond is not authorised. There is no exemption available to a property firm. That is why this page contains no opinion about what you should do, why the tool asks you nothing about your debts, and why every outcome on it is displayed to every visitor regardless of what they type — a tool that filtered the options to fit your circumstances would itself be advice. There is a second reason, and it is the one that should reassure you most. If we gave you unauthorised debt advice and then introduced you to an authorised firm, the law would make your agreement with that firm unenforceable against you, and you could recover what you had paid plus compensation. No competent insolvency practitioner would ever take an introduction from us again. Staying on the right side of this line is not a courtesy to you; it is the condition of us having a business at all.

No. It is the single most damaging thing you can do, it will be undone, and it may be prosecuted. A transaction at an undervalue — a gift, or a transfer for significantly less than the property is worth — can be unwound on the application of a trustee going back five years before the bankruptcy. For anything done in the two years immediately before, the trustee does not have to prove you were insolvent at the time at all. Between two and five years insolvency must be shown, but where the transferee is an associate — a spouse, a civil partner, a relative or a business partner — insolvency is presumed and the burden falls on you to disprove it. Separately, where a transaction was entered into for the purpose of putting assets beyond the reach of someone who may make a claim, there is no time limit in the section at all; the courts apply the ordinary limitation rules, which can run to twelve years, and the applicant does not even have to be a trustee. And it is a criminal offence for a bankrupt to have made a gift or transfer of property in the five years before the bankruptcy, unless they can prove they had no intent to defraud or to conceal the state of their affairs. The practical result is that the property comes back into the estate, the person you transferred it to is joined into the litigation at their own expense, your costs are likely to be assessed on the indemnity basis, and the court disbelieves the rest of your evidence. Concealment is worse still: if you do not tell the trustee about your interest within three months, the three-year revesting clock does not start until the trustee finds out for themselves.

It means less than people hope, and the disappointment is usually about debt relief orders. A DRO is the cheapest and simplest route out of unmanageable debt — there has been no application fee since April 2024 — and its asset limit is £2,000. The trap is that this limit is measured on gross value, not on equity. The mortgage is not deducted. The Insolvency Service’s own guidance for official receivers says so in terms: because the property level is gross rather than net, it is highly unlikely, if not impossible, that a homeowner would meet this condition. So a house worth £285,000 with £300,000 secured against it is worth nothing to anyone in the world and still fails the test. Negative equity does not help you here. What it does do is remove the incentive for a trustee in bankruptcy to pursue the property, which is precisely why the £1,000 mandatory dismissal threshold exists. And it does not stop your lender: bankruptcy restricts what ordinary creditors may do but expressly does not affect a secured creditor’s right to enforce their security, so possession proceedings can continue throughout, and any shortfall after a sale remains owed as an unsecured debt. The other DRO conditions, for completeness, are debts under £50,000, surplus income under £75 a month and a vehicle under £4,000 — and you cannot apply yourself, it has to go through an approved intermediary, which is one of the free agencies named at the top of this page.

It was true. It is not true of arrangements set up under the protocol that took effect on 1 April 2025, and this is one of the most out-of-date pieces of information on the internet. Under the previous protocol, where equity exceeded a de minimis of £5,000 the arrangement ran for seventy-two months with an equity review at month fifty-four, at which point the individual had to attempt to release equity by further secured borrowing, subject to affordability limits, with a further twelve months of payments if that failed. The current protocol replaces that entirely. Equity is calculated as 85% of the property’s value less the secured borrowing. Where the individual’s beneficial interest comes to less than £10,000, the family home is excluded from the arrangement and it runs for sixty months. Where it is £10,000 or more, the arrangement runs for seventy-two months instead — twelve extra months of payments, rather than any obligation to sell or remortgage. The published consumer summary puts it plainly: you will not need to sell or use any equity in your home to pay for your IVA. Two caveats. Existing arrangements continue on the terms they were agreed under, so if you entered an IVA before April 2025 the old rules may still govern it. And non-protocol IVAs are not bound by any of this. The point that survives all of it is that the whole thing turns on a valuation, applied at 85%, and it is worth having that number be a real one.

We cannot tell you whether to, but we can tell you what to work out first, and it is arithmetic rather than advice. Cash-buying firms deliberately target people in financial difficulty, and offers typically land between 75% and 82% of open market value. The pitch is speed and certainty rather than price, and sometimes that is a genuinely fair trade — if a possession hearing is listed and there is real equity that will otherwise be consumed, a certain completion can be worth more than a better price that arrives too late. Very often it is not a fair trade, and nobody has done the sum. Do the sum. Compare the cash offer, net of the secured lending, against an ordinary sale net of the costs of sale. On a £285,000 property the gap between the two is frequently more than £50,000. Two further points. A lender must treat possession as a last resort, must not normally start a claim until other reasonable attempts have failed, and must hold off where the borrower is actively marketing the property for sale — so being genuinely on the market is itself worth time. And the offer to refuse outright, whatever the numbers say: any arrangement where you sell the property and stay in it as a tenant. That is sale and rent back. It is a regulated activity, arranging one without permission is a criminal offence, and the regulator effectively closed the market in 2009 because of the harm it was doing to people in exactly this position. If someone is offering it to you today, they are very unlikely to be authorised to.

Much less than you would hope, and it is better to know that now. Where a trustee applies to sell a jointly owned home, the court weighs the creditors’ interests, the conduct and the needs and resources of a spouse or former spouse, and the needs of any children — but expressly not the needs of the bankrupt. And after one year from the estate first vesting in a trustee, the court must assume that the creditors’ interests outweigh all other considerations unless the circumstances of the case are exceptional. The leading Court of Appeal authority sets the bar by saying that the circumstances must be outside the usual melancholy consequences of debt and improvidence. On that test, the eviction of a family, children changing schools and the loss of the family home are all ordinary consequences, not exceptions. What has actually succeeded is serious illness or disability affecting someone other than the bankrupt: a wife undergoing chemotherapy, a wife with paranoid schizophrenia, a husband severely disabled after a stroke, an adult son with quadriplegic cerebral palsy requiring continuous care. Even in those cases the courts have usually postponed the sale rather than refused it — by six months, a year, three years, occasionally longer. One case where indefinite postponement was granted was later reined in on the basis that indefinite postponement is wrong in principle. Human rights arguments about the right to respect for the home have been run repeatedly and have not succeeded; the courts hold that the statutory balance already embodies them.

The company’s debts are the company’s, and the corporate veil holds unless something pierces it. The things that pierce it are worth knowing precisely, and only one of them is about property. Personal guarantees are the commonest and the most direct: if you have guaranteed the company’s borrowing, lease or trade credit, that is your personal debt and your house is exposed to it in the ordinary way. An overdrawn director’s loan account becomes a debt you owe the company, and a liquidator will pursue it. Wrongful trading makes a director personally liable to contribute where they continued trading after the point at which they knew or ought to have concluded there was no reasonable prospect of avoiding insolvent liquidation, and the defence requires that you took every step to minimise loss to creditors — not reasonable steps, every step. Disqualification runs from two to fifteen years. And re-using a prohibited company name is both a criminal offence and a route to personal liability for the new company’s debts. All of that is a question for an insolvency practitioner or a solicitor, and we will not offer a view on any of it, including the one question directors most want answered, which is when to stop trading. What we will do, quickly and on a stated basis, is value the company’s premises — which matters more than directors expect, because a contemporaneous valuation is evidence going to the balance sheet test and to whether there was a reasonable prospect of avoiding insolvency. We will also assess the leasehold exit properly, including dilapidations, which is frequently the largest number nobody has put in the assessment.

If you are the person facing bankruptcy, a possession claim or an equity review in an arrangement, the valuation is free. Free meaning free: no fee, no fee on completion, and no obligation to sell through us. Take the report to your adviser and never speak to us again if that is the right answer for you. We think that is the correct position for a page aimed at people who by definition have no money, and we would rather be the firm you trusted at the worst point than the firm that charged you at it. Where we are paid is by institutions. £350 for a valuation instructed by a trustee, liquidator, administrator, receiver or secured lender, on a stated basis with the marketing-period assumption spelled out and the evidence attached, because an office-holder has to be able to show how the figure was reached. £125 a month for looking after vacant premises while a process runs. And 1.25% if a property is sold through us, whoever instructs it. What we do not take, ever, is a referral fee, commission or any other payment from anybody on the debt side — not from an IVA provider, not from an insolvency practitioner, not from a debt management firm, and not through any associated company. The regulator banned providers from paying those fees in 2023 after finding firms manipulating people’s figures to push them into fee-paying arrangements, in one case steering a homeless person into a £6,000 IVA instead of a debt relief order that would have cost nothing. We were never going to take one, but you are entitled to be told rather than asked to assume.