Reclaiming mortgage charges......

liberty_lily

Hi Everyone,

Back in 2006 we were having some financial difficulties and took out a second mortgage with Swift Advances for £58,553.00 complete with front-loaded PPI of £5323.00. Unfortunately their punitive rates didn't help matters and we were soon in arrears. They threatened to repossess our house and sent court papers etc. With help from our families we repaid the arrears and as far as we knew the court case was stopped. The stress was too much for my husband who already had a very stressful time at work and he tried to kill himself by taking an overdose of painkillers.

After recovering from this terrible situation we sold our house and paid off both our mortgages. The settlement from Swift contained over £3400 of charges including collection charges, counselling fees and legal fees, apart from the ERC of over £5000. We would now like to try to get recompense for the way Swift treated us.

Now I know we cannot reclaim the ERC and we intend to reclaim the PPI (I will start a thread about that in the right place!), but I am unsure as to how much of the other charges are reclaimable?

I especially ask this as we never had a court hearing, nor met with any counsellors, yet were charged £1910.00 for these alone!

Apologies for the long post and any advice would be very welcome.

Thank you,

Lily

liberty_lily

Bumping this in the hope of some advice please!

liberty_lily

Can anyone help with this please?

Many thanks,

Lily

dunstonh

There is little coverage of success of people claiming back mortgage arrears fees. Because these are documented as covering time spent and work done rather than being a penalty, there is a different view taken on them compared to overdraft penalty fees.

That is why you dont see much coverage on these forums on mortgage fees. There is a thread in this section that appears from time to time with someone posting a comment and it seems to be mostly full of people asking the question if they can claim back or not or the odd person that has been successful and an equal number that have failed. The problem with failure is that the banks do tend to fight their corner on this one and do ask to recover costs if you lose.

Gorgeous_George

I don't think either of you need the stress that losing a battle with Swift would bring.

Sometimes we have to accept the things we cannot change.

If you decide to go ahead, find a no win no fee solicitor to handle the case for you. If you can't find one, take that as an indicator of the likely success.

Just think, if you hadn't sold, the house would be worth much less today.

Best wishes with whatever you decide.

GG

liberty_lily

Thank you both for your responses.

Lily