Help .. Mortgage and Associated Items

plucker1

Hi .. New to the site
I am wondering if anybody might be able to help
in 2001 me and my wife bought our 1st house, we spoke to the Bank direct and used their own Mortgage person.
Not knowing anything about Mortgages i said i just wanted a fixed monthly payment so he sold us a Repayment Mortgage that was a Base Rate Tracker
When he sold this to us we had to take out Their Insurances .. i.e. Buildings, Contacts, Life & Payment Protection .. well thats what he told us we had to have to gain the Tracker Mortgage, and thats why 10yrs or so down the line all our policies are the same, same company etc
What i am wondering is would this be worth pursuing as i have heard about all the mis-selling recently ?
I am also not very happy that he told us our Mortgage was a Base Rate Tracker - he did not explain they charge their own form of Base Rate .. so the Bank of England might say the Base Rate is 0.5% but they charge 1.99% or something, and only check it once a year so i have also just found out

so if anyone could offer me some advice on what i could do i would be very grateful

Me and my wife are healthy and in full-time employed employment with full sick pay etc

thank you

R_P_W

What bank was it? What term was the mortgage? Is the mortgage still tracking the BOE base rate or has that period ended and you are now paying SVR?

If you are still tracking the BOE rate then you are probably doing pretty well with it right now with rates being so low?

Are you tied into any of the insurances with the mortgage? What does the paperwork say?

Would suggest you get all the paper work for the insurances and look whether what you are paying is competitive - it probably isn't.

Same with the mortgage....time to review whether you have a decent product or not

Jimbo1976

As R P W has suggested, you should review all of the policies you have as well as your mortgage.

You have probably done quite well from your base rate tracker recently as the base rate has been very low for the past 3.5 years or so. So whilst you suggest that you asked for a fixed rate, it is hard to see the detriment you have suffered as you are muh better off than you would have been if you took out a ten year fixed rate in 2001, do you know if your mortgage was fixed to start with and the changed to a tracker (some do this rather than going onto an standard variable rate. Your original documentation will confirm this. If you check your paperwork every year then you would have realised that your mortgage was not fixed a decade or so ago, giving you ample opportunity to complain/remortgage etc

As to whether you have been mis sold insurances that's a tougher question. Clearly when you took out your mortgage you would have needed to have had buildings insurance (as the lender insists on this), it would have been sensible to have had contents insurance, life assurance would have been sensible if you or your wife would have struggled to pay the mortgage if one of you died. The fact that you were sold payment protection does not necessarily mean it was mis sold. If it protected you against unemployment and one or both of you were self employed then that is an issue.

The fact that you were told you had to take these out does complicate things, does it say this in writing anywhere? If it does you may have some grounds to complain.

plucker1

Hi Jimbo / RPW

The honest answer is i am not really sure .. the mortgage advisor gave me a price and we paid it.

Like you say i am going to have to check it all out, they dont seem to send me much in the way of paperwork, as far as i know it is still some kind of Tracker Mortgage, like i say they are pretty rubbish at telling me or sending me the paperwork.

The Mortgage was taken out through The Woolwich / Barclays .. hence all the Insurances are Barclays as far as i know, i need to check, i dont think i have anything in writing regarding the Insurances as the advisor told me and my wife in his office at the bank, he basically said "if you want this you have to have these or you wont get it"

i do understand about the need to be insured but i never knew i didnt have to take their own policies, thats why all my policies are theirs and been the same since it started

i asked the question because a friend of my wife had a claim go through and she said to my wife about it, so we looked into it a bit more, i did briefly check my Buildings and Contents Insurance .. as they sent me a letter saying they had made some sort of admin mistake and it says it costs £810 per year and i am sure this is Buildings & Contents .. i did check on here for a quote and it said a lot, lot less .. Insured for £152k Buildings & £10k Contents .. so i am thinking i should look elsewhere

it does annoy me though that i feel i have been a bit mis-led on this with them telling me it was buy this or you cant get the mortgage product, but then i guess this is something i am going to have to live with, both myself and my wife have and are Employed with full sick pay for at least 1 year in our jobs that we have had since the mortgage and insurances were taken out ... i guess i should look over the Payment protection and Life Policies too .. i have not to date as i have just budgeted for all this each month as you do, under the impression that my bank could be trusted to do whats right for us

thanks for this and any other advice

Jimbo1976

Barclays/Woolwich tend to offer mortgages which change into tracker rates (rather than going onto an SVR), so it may be that your mortgage was fixed originally but when your fixed rate finishes then it goes to a tracker rate.

I am sure that you will be able to reduce the buildings and contents cost.

Good luck

kingstreet

plucker1 wrote: »

I am also not very happy that he told us our Mortgage was a Base Rate Tracker - he did not explain they charge their own form of Base Rate .. so the Bank of England might say the Base Rate is 0.5% but they charge 1.99% or something, and only check it once a year so i have also just found out

The Barclays Bank base rate is the same as the BoE base rate, and AFAIK it always has been.

There are various threads on here which you'll find if you do a search.

Dave_Ham

I fear we are going to see more and more threads like this.

Want to have a complain up and not actually sure what you have to complain about.

Can I respectfully suggest that you get the paperwork in order first and assess what you have. Only then can you decide if it was/is inappropriate.

I would imagine you have had one of the biggest results seen on the mortgage front and whilst you are likely to have had overpriced insurances to boot, this may be small fry and a fair amount of ignorance on your part.

Get your paperwork together and let us know, when you get it you may want to get some open market quotes on the insurances and at least save yourself some money going forward

happycamel_2

As Dave says, get your paperwork together, phone Barclays with your policy numbers and ask them to explain what products you have and at what cost. It sounds like you took a mortgage but at the time and in the following ten years you haven't bothered to understand it, or the other financial products you have. Given that this is the biggest debt and asset you'll ever have I would have thought it warranted a bit of effort and time, it's good to see you doing this now.

We'll help where we can. But it's frustrating to see people expecting compensation for their own laziness. If you bought and insured a car for £10k you'd make sure it met your needs, you wouldnt walk in to a dealership and expect them to understand all your circumstances and then sell you the best value product for you with no unnecessary extras.

_Andy_

"Oooooh I've got insurance policies so I've been mis-sold"

jeez