Endowments - Abbey Life want to increase monthly premium

suest

Got an endowment with Abbey Life - been paying same monthly premium for years - received numerous letters over the years indicating shortfall - already made provision with ISA's to cover shortfall. they have now written to me saying that they are increasing my monthly premium to cover shortfall - can they doo this?? i have written to say that i do not want my monthly premium to increase - just received letter back this morning saying that there are 2 types of reviews conducted on policy - 1st is contractual and in accordance with conditions - 2nd is non contractual - if shortfall is found at contractual review - premium is automatically increased - i was not aware of this - they now say that if we do not want to increase our monthly premiums we have to sign declaration that policy condition 17 is cancelled and removed from policy - has anyone else had this problem - i'm worried about signing this - i have phoned them and waiting for someone to get back to me. thanks

toonfish

if it was mine, there's no way I'd still be paying into it at all, let alone extra premiums

tillson

I had a similar situation a few years ago with Guardian Royal. They just increased my premium by default to cover the shortfall. Like you, I had made alternative arrangements to cover the difference. In my case converted the mortgage to a repayment.

I wrote them a very nasty letter basically saying that I didn't want to invest any aditional money with them and how dare they assume that I did. The premium remained the same and the situation angered me so much that it motivated me into making a claim for mis-selling in the first instance. Finnished up getting £7500 from them

suest

thanks for the replies - have already got compensation a few years ago - think it was about £4,000. Toon fish: we've got no option - we've only got 7 years left on it.

toonfish

suest wrote:

thanks for the replies - have already got compensation a few years ago - think it was about £4,000. Toon fish: we've got no option - we've only got 7 years left on it.

you still have options though. You could cash it in and pay a lumpsum off the mortgage, switching the rest to repayment. You should investigate all the options.

suest

toonfish wrote:

you still have options though. You could cash it in and pay a lumpsum off the mortgage, switching the rest to repayment. You should investigate all the options.

thanks but we have already looked at all our options - we have got money in ISA's to cover shortfall so provided they can't make force us to increase our monthly premiums we're quite happy to stick to what we're doing - my point was can they force you to increase??