Endowment mis-selling question.

Alipally

Being the simple soul I am, when I received my red letter in Sept 2006, it came with the FSA Factsheet 'Will your investment or savings plan pay off your mortgage?
I read it and it basically says ( I still have the document!) if you can't avoid a shortfall, you have to find a way of paying it yourself. So we converted to repayment mortgage and now we have no mortgage. I did, however, keep my endowment going, because cashing it in would guarantee a loss and even the worst return meant we'd recoup our repayments...
I didn't realise that I could claim anything until the last couple of weeks when my son who works for NFU Mutual looked at my annual statement and asked if we'd claimed compensation.

Is it worth claiming now, (I'm pretty sure we are out of the time limit... but the FSA leaflet they sent me didn't mention that I would be entittled to anything... and I could possibly use that as evidence of them, maybe not telling me that I could claim?)
Has anyone had any success claiming out of the time limit?
I'm eager to know your experiences!

thanks
Ali

opinions4u

On what grounds would you have claimed?

A policy under performing isn't grounds for compensation on its own.

dunstonh

Being the simple soul I am, when I received my red letter in Sept 2006, it came with the FSA Factsheet 'Will your investment or savings plan pay off your mortgage?

Key date as you have three years from receiving your first red letter/high risk of shortfall letter to make your complaint, if you have one. After which, the company can time bar you from any future complaint. Over three quarters of endowments are now timebarred from complaint.

Has anyone had any success claiming out of the time limit?

It is possible but rare. You would need to show that you didnt know about the shortfall and took no action with it or that you were effectively incapacitated for the whole period of the three year countdown and every year thereafter.

As you took action and switched to repayment, then it would be hard to argue that you didnt know about it.

Also, you cant just claim compensation. Most endowment complaints were rejected. You needed a reason for complaint. The available evidence would need to support your reasons. We were given some complaint ratios a number of years back that indicated that out of 1000 complaints on average, 20 would be dead cert upheld complaints whilst a further 250 would still result in payout but not upheld because of poor record keeping or poor documentation. The rest would be rejected. It was the poor record keeping/poor documentation that people typically aimed for when completing.

However, if you are timebarred, then you are out of luck.