I need help getting my money from the Abbey and Phoenix

Bosslady

We have an endowment policy with Phoenix which matured on 11/10/09 to pay off our Abbey National mortage. We only owe just over £6000 on our mortgage and the endowment payout is £22,500 but the money has to go via the Abbey as they have an interest in it. One month later the money is still sitting in an account with the Phoenix because they cannot get their acts together. Phoenix say Abbey haven't sent the right paperwork, Abbey say they have. Neither will phone the other, they have to write about everything. Meantime we are due to pay another mortgage interest payment this week. In 25 years we have never paid late to either company but now it comes to getting our money they are completely dragging their feet. I have rung both companies several times and I am at my wits end. We really need some of this money for a holiday we are taking in 3 weeks time - I never thought we would still be waiting for it! Does anyone have any advice for me? How do I get them to give us our money?

benjo

how frustrating!!! You could write to both companies and suggest that unless the money is paid by a certain date you will begin to charge them compound interest on the outstanding amount at ??% - I doubt they will take that seriously though and I doubt it is enforcable, honestly I dont know what you can do other than make a noise. Promise to tell everyone who will listen to just how bad the service has been. Goodluck.

ERICS_MUM

How frustrating, you must be really annoyed by now.

My sister had a different problem with Abbey (30 fraudulent debits totalling £20,000 from her account took Abbey 6 months to sort out) and could not get it sorted. So out of desperation she contacted Santander, their parent company in Spain - using the e-mail enquiry form on their website (see link below). Santander did not reply to my sis but they quickly passed the complaint on to the head of the relevant dept. of Abbey who then called sis and started to sort it out.

https://secure.santander.com/formularios/Corporativo/contacto_en.jsp

It might be worth trying it. Good luck

Linda :j

Bosslady

Yay - a man from the Abbey has phoned me today and it looks as if things are moving at last. Turns out that you really need to speak to the Complaints dept before anything actually gets done. Thanks for all the help :j

cottager

Bosslady wrote: »

We have an endowment policy with Phoenix which matured on 11/10/09 to pay off our Abbey National mortage. We only owe just over £6000 on our mortgage and the endowment payout is £22,500 but the money has to go via the Abbey as they have an interest in it. One month later the money is still sitting in an account with the Phoenix because they cannot get their acts together. ...

Now you've made me slightly nervous...
Spookily similar situation here even down to the figures, only substitute Standard Life for Phoenix. Endowment matures and mortgage with Abbey ends next Monday, and I must admit -- being Abbey -- I was already wondering how long it would take before we saw the balance.

Having never been in this situation before, I rang Abbey about a month ago when we'd heard nothing, as we were wondering what the procedure was and what we had to do, if anything, or if it just 'happened' (also to check if our final payment was last month or this, would our deeds be sent securely etc). It was like talking to a wall... I ended up none the wiser at all.

So I tried the other end and rang SL, and it couldn't have been more different. Spoke to a lovely lady there, really helpful, who explained it all very well and told me that coincidentally their letter to us about it had been generated that day... sure enough it turned up a couple of days later. (Bit of a rave from the grave, as it quoted the mortgage lender as National & Provincial BS, which it was 25 yrs ago!)

Abbey have first call on the proceeds obviously, so SL had also written to them that day. She told me that in the event Abbey did not respond before the maturity date to confirm they wanted to 'appropriate' the funds, SL would send the total proceeds directly to us -- it would then be our responsibility to settle the outstanding mortgage amount with Abbey when requested.

We had a letter and forms to fill in from Abbey a couple of weeks later which have now been returned, so I assume they must have responded to SL's prod... well, they'd be stupid not to! Abbey's letter assured us any balance from the endowment would be forwarded to us 'promptly', so we'll see

Good luck with yours anyway... good to hear someone from Abbey has actually contacted you now.