confused - mortgage and life assurance from 11 years ago

mrs_thor · 28 October 2013 at 7:11PM

Hi everyone

I'm new to this forum, so please excuse me if the answers I'm looking for are somewhere obvious.

Here's the situation:

Back in 2002 my husband and I took out a joint mortgage which was arranged through our estate agent. They also told us we had to arrange buildings insurance and decreasing term life assurance with them.

We ended up with a mortgage from Nationwide, and buildings insurance and life assurance from Countrywide Assured. In fact we have a life assurance policy each from them.

We cancelled the buildings insurance some years ago to find our own choice of provider, but left the life assurance as we had been told it was necessary in order to have the mortgage.

Now I have been told (don't know if it's true) that nowadays you don't have to take out decreasing term life assurance when taking out a mortgage, but you might need to show you have other life assurance / life insurance?

I am wary of cancelling our policies as I don't know if we are still obliged to have them or not. I do know that we only took them out because we were told to - we already each had life insurance in place for a larger amount than the amount of our mortgage.

My questions are:

a) At the time we were sold the policies, was the procedure correct? i.e. did we HAVE to take them out even though we already had life insurance elsewhere?

b) If the procedure had changed since 2002, surely we should have been officially notified that we could cancel our policies without repercussion?

c) Would I have any claim for mis-selling - and if so how would I go about it?

I am really confused and not at all sure what to do. I just know I don't want to keep paying for a policy that I don't feel I ever needed. And would like my money back if possible.

Thanks for any help / advice.