Alliance & Leicester Flexi Loan

Whatfroth

Did a bit of auditing of my wife's finances this month and found that she's been paying a loan to Alliance & Leicester at £50 pcm. She admitted that it was a bit of a head in the sand thing for her, but when she went to the bank (now Santander) to clarify things, they looked a bit confused and said they'd issue a statement for her.

The loan was started in July 2003 as an A & L Flexi Loan for a total of £2126 and she's been paying £50 a month ever since. Santander have said that there's £96 left on the loan which I guess is something, but it doesn't make sense that she would have paid back this much - the loan at 16% interest should have been paid off in 2008 at the very latest.

We've not done any investigation since, but Santander have indicated that the "loan was paid again" which to me doesn't make sense - in my experience, loans are not issued again as a "renewal" of sorts.

They have sent a statement of payments since Santander took over A&L in Mar 2010 with two columns of credit and debit - credit indicating her £50 payment and a debit of slowly declining interest payments. This doesn't make any sense to me.

Does anyone have any experience of dealing with Alliance & Leicester on this sort of thing and has anyone ever taken out a "Flexi Loan" with them? My wife doesn't have any documentation on what the terms of the loan were, and I'm sure that she wouldn't have to pay what is in the region of around £6600 in total on a £2126 loan.

thebritishbloke

Once you do the calculations, it seems like this should have been paid in a little over 5 years.

I'd pester Santander to get the full history of loan payments/repayments, they should have access to the data given that they took on the accounts. If they can't provide that, I'd argue your point that it should have been paid in 5 years, which would have been 2008, so they should refund all payments made since they took over the account in 2010.