23/04/2010 by admin.

How many people are out there at this moment in time wondering how they got into financial mess they are currently in. It should not be a surprise when one considers how easy it was to get credit only up until a few years ago. Every week the recycling box was filled to the brim with junk mail offering credit cards, loans, mortgages, remortgages and everything in between! This was also a time when your friendly loan broker or financial adviser used to give you the annual financial health check. The ‘I’m in the area next week’ phone call to arrange an appointment to see if they can improve your current deals and perhaps get you a better mortgage. 

Well unfortunately with the credit crunch and the knock on effect in house values everything has come home to roost. Some of the deals that were being offered were more for the benefit of the adviser in terms of the commissions they could earn and it would now seem that certain regulations have been breached. This is good news for borrowers because missold mortgages mean they can get back money they should never have paid out as compensation.   The Financial Services Authority introduced certain regulations at the end of 2004 to basically stamp out bad practice. However, with juicy commissions being payable on certain mortgage products the temptation was too great and the bad practices just rolled on. In addition the lenders were basically falling over themselves to thrust money at people especially if you were a property owner. They had no qualms about lending the money because they knew there was the ever increasing value on their investment. It was during this ‘gold rush’period that there was a high proportion of missold mortgages 

The good news is that the codes of conduct introduced to stop this misselling can now be used to prove that you have a missold mortgage. Due to the complexity of the mortgage market and the MCOB rules a mortgage audit will be required to prove if a missale has occurred. However before this procedure is commissioned certain points need to be established to see if an audit is worthwhile. If a broker or IFA was involved in the mortgage the transaction needs to have taken place after October 31^st 2004.The main problem was brokers advising their clients to take out a sub prime mortgage when in reality they could have qualified to get a mortgage from a high street lender. These sub prime mortgages would have been taken out with lenders like GE Money or Platform although the Northern Rock together mortgage has taken bad press. 

Other areas for consideration is if the broker made you take out a self cert mortgage and you were in full time employment. If the broker charged a set up fee. Will the mortgage take you past retirement age? Were you repeatedly moved from one low-start mortgage to another with the same lender incurring fees each time? If you get the feeling that you have one of the thousands of missold mortgages,now is the time to get an audit and get the claims procedure in action.  www.missoldmortgages.org.uk

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14/08/2009 by admin.

Join the blog and we will do our best to help you reclaim missold PPI.

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14/08/2009 by admin.

With tThe number of complaints rising at an alarming rate against the financial institutions it is becoming increasingly obvious that the complaints procedure is taking much longer. Some of the major lenders are rejecting the vast majority of claims made against them which is in turn bringing increased pressure on the Financial Ombudsman Service. One major bank in particular rejects virtually every claim made against it even when there is clear evidence to suggest that this form of insurance should never have been sold to the borrower. 

It has got to such a stage that the FOS is set to announce individual figures for the level of complaints that banks and financial institutions have received regarding payment protection insurance. It is highly likely that a number of the major institutions will find themselves at the top of the list. It could also prove embarrassing as some of these will undoubtedly include banks that have been bailed out using tax payer’s money. 

It’s becoming increasingly obvious that the lenders are using high rejection rates as a deliberate tactic to slow the process down but more cynically as a deliberate tactic to try and get consumers to give up their claim.