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Was I mis-sold buildings insurance?
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There is nothing wrong with your buildings insurance, its normal for it to be compulsory to have it and have unlimited cover (which is good!!!). It may well have been compulsory to have it with Halifax, this is a point more relevant to PPI which this is not.
As for not being made aware you could get elsewhere, there has never been such requirement, Waitrose don't tell you the fruit is better or cheaper in Asda do they? Halifax will correctly only discuss their own products. This is a point that is incorrectly referenced with PPI which you are not talking about. Have you never seen TV adverts? insurance is advertised all the time! Direct Line, Aviva, More Than, Churchill, Axa, LV, they all sell buildings insurance.
Misunderstanding is not mis-selling. Your buildings insurance was not mis-sold.0 -
rippedoffmum wrote: »The first thing I intend to do is to cancel the insurance and ask for repayment of future months until next year. I don't know if they will let me do this as the annual premium has been taken rather than it being done monthly. They told me that it was £54 pounds something a month but it's not taken out monthly. Then I will go on uswitch or wherever and find another policy and take that out.
We can't give advice on here, but I think you're going about things the wrong way round.
In general, if you want to replace an insurance policy you find the new one first, and then you cancel the old one. If you cancel first, then you risk not being about to get cover at all - and then you'll be left uninsured.
Unless there's something unusual about the property you shouldn't have a problem getting replacement insurance, but you probably don't know what sort of things an underwriter would consider unusual. So, probably not a good plan to cancel anything until you know you've replaced it.
Apart from anything it may be a good idea to let the existing policy run to the end of its term. Cancelling early is likely to incur some sort of admin fee, and (depending on the amount) you could be better off waiting.
Finally, I think you might have trouble with getting quotes from an online comparison site. They're set up for people with absolutely standard situations - and "officially" owning a house that "unofficially" isn't yours is not a standard situation! You might prefer to speak to an insurance broker to be sure the cover you're buying actually does provide the cover you think it does.
But like the others, I don't really see that the lender has done anything wrong. You needed insurance, you got insurance, and although it might have been more expensive than elsewhere, that honestly is like complaining Waitrose's crisps cost more than Asda's. Larger amounts of money, sure - but your lender didn't have to tell you about other lender's products.0 -
rippedoffmum wrote: »Thanks in advance for any advice.
You really were not mis-sold this insurance. You are free to look around for a cheaper deal if you wish, but do ensure that the cover provided is the same.0 -
rippedoffmum wrote: »Just to clarify, when I took out the mortgage on the cottage I did know that buildings insurance was mandatory but I also thought it was mandatory to have it with the mortgage provider.
As far as unlimited cover versus a specific amount is concerned, as has been said earlier, you seem to have insured your home for the purchase price, rather than the rebuilding cost. If you are in the south east, this will probably mean you have insured it for more than you need to.
If you are in the north, the cost of rebuilding will almost certainly be more than its sale value so insuring it for the purchase price could be a very expensive mistake.
Not only would the insurance company only pay out up to the amount of cover you have if it was totally destroyed but if, for example, you insured it for £100,000 and the rebuilding cost was £200,000 (i.e. you had insured it for half the full cost of rebuilding) then it would only pay half of ANY claim. So, for example, if you had £50,000 of damage it would pay only £25,000 - leaving you to find £25,000 for yourself.
That is why the Halifax (and other policies) now tend to be unlimited. Insurers have a far better idea how much it would cost to rebuild a house than home owners do because they deal with such things all the time. You and I would be unlucky to face that problem ever - and extremely unlucky to do so more than once. So they price on the basis of what the average policy would cost them with some adjustment for size and location.
If you are insuring for a specified amount, you really need to get a Chartered Surveyor to tell you how much that specified amount should be. That will probably cost more than you save on the premium, though.0 -
I put this original thread on here ages and ages ago and I meant to come back and say what happened but never got round to it (rarely use the site). I had the outcome in January this year so it was months ago and I don't know if anyone will read this but here goes.
Halifax - where I had my current, savings and mortgage accounts - changed my address on all these accounts for me when I moved out of London to a new address in 2003. So all correspondence came to my new home address. The property I wrote about in the original post is a second home but all correspondence about it would come to my regular home address.
Although I had buildings insurance with the Halifax on a property mortgaged by the Halifax, the insurance arm is a separate part of the business. So when I told Halifax I had moved out of London this information did not go to the Halifax insurance company. It wouldn't have occurred to me that I had to tell them I'd moved, as it was all Halifax and my other accounts changed over.
So for eleven years letters asking me if I wanted to renew my buildings insurance were being sent to an address in London where I no longer lived. I wasn't aware of the premiums rocketing as they were being taking out of my mortgage account.
I made a complaint by telephone. I was very lucky in that there was a woman I spoke to who was 'on my side' - she didn't think it was right that I hadn't received the renewal letters, notwithstanding the fact that it was up to me to shop around for insurance.
When her boss said that there was nothing they could do, she asked me to leave it with her and said that she was going to escalate it. I'd like to point out that I was very polite and humble in all my conversations, did not kick off or get angry. I just said I was upset and felt let down by Halifax, who I've been a good customer of for twenty years+ and would not feel the same trust and would move my accounts.
In the end they offered to refund me the difference between the premiums they had been charging me and the cheapest quote that I could find now, which was about £150. So for the most recent year alone the refund was £450. For all other premiums I'd paid I was also given the difference between what I'd paid, plus interest.
I was refunded just under £4000.
I was accused of making a troll post and I thought some people were a bit nasty when I started this thread. I had been naive but the fact is that I wasn't receiving letters that I should have received. Halifax probably wouldn't have given me so much (they called it a gesture of goodwill) if I wasn't a longstanding customer.
Obviously I was very pleased with how it turned out.
I'm grateful for advice I was given but I think the consensus was that I didn't have a leg to stand on and I got refunded a large sum of money so I'm posting this in case anyone else finds themself in a similar position, to make the point that it's always worth seeing if something can be done.0 -
You got very lucky. One suspects that there is more to this than you are saying as based solely on what you said in your earlier posts, you did not have a leg to stand on. Be happy they were generous to you. Indeed, very generous. Your long term history with them may have something to do with it.I am an Independent Financial Adviser (IFA). The comments I make are just my opinion and are for discussion purposes only. They are not financial advice and you should not treat them as such. If you feel an area discussed may be relevant to you, then please seek advice from an Independent Financial Adviser local to you.0
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Nope, there is absolutely nothing more to it than I have said. Sounds a little bit like you are accusing me of lying or at least being economical with the truth. I'm not.
The only other details that might have some relevance... I have banked with Halifax for twenty plus years, I have a savings account with them that had £45K in it at the time and at one point had over £100K in it, I have a first home that I own outright and I qualified last year as a doctor so I have a secure job. These things might make me a customer they'd rather not lose, but I've had the impression that banks aren't really that bothered about these things any more.
I think I got very lucky with the woman I spoke to on the phone, she really fought my case. Halifax accepted that some of the problem was that customer details between the banking and insurance arms weren't linked and they had been sending letters to the wrong address for years. But they described it as a gesture of goodwill.
The reason I posted on here again was because I thought it might be helpful to share this, not because I wanted to be trolled again by the experts.0 -
dunstonh it looks as if you have edited your post and it looks less accusatory now. Thank you.0
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I think they've been particularly generous in this case.
I accept that the insurance premium renewal letters didn't go to your current address.... But from what you said that you were getting your mortgage statements up until two years ago, so you must have been aware that they were debiting insurance premiums from your mortgage.
I know you say you were a naive stay at home mum...... But that sounds a bit disingenuous, when you go on to stay you've just qualified as a doctor.
But, you've had a good outcome - I would now urge you to regularise the rest of your finances.
Have you got the right sort of insurancee for the property now. You clearly aren't living in the property, and most standard insurances assume the person who is taking out the insurance is living in the house. Plus, be careful that you aren't under-insured. You don't seem keen on 'unlimited' cover, so make sure you are covered for the rebuilding cost of the property, not the market valuation. Older properties in particular often cost more to rebuild than it would cost to buy.
Plus, there's the question of the long term future of the property. Who is living in the property at the moment (again, this affects the property insurance, or if it's empty, this is another property insurance issue), plus, you need to sort out now who owns the property - if it's your husbands and you have split up, he should be buying you out - why pay a mortgage on a property that is 'his'?
Now is the time to be sorting all this out - not later - things have a habit of becoming even more complicated if they are left.Early retired - 18th December 2014
If your dreams don't scare you, they're not big enough0 -
Thanks for your reply Goldiegirl for your helpful advice.
First I just have to dispute your suggestion that it's disingenuous to say that was a naive stay at home mum when I've just qualified as a doctor! The two things aren't mutually exclusive at all. I stopped work in 2000 and went to medical school in 2009 and was then a student for five years. During the whole of that time I was completely dependent on my husband financially and he was in charge of everything. The only reason the mortgage on the second home was in my name was because it was less complicated at the time - he solely owned our main house and I was still working, just about to have my first baby. So I took out the mortgage. But not long after that I stopped earning and I didn't start again until last August.
Doctors are just as rubbish with money as everyone else anyway, in fact sometimes even more so because work takes up so much time that it's easy to get lazy about these things.
Apart from that, you are absolutely right that things need to be regularised. I separated nearly three years ago and the second home is still in my sole name. This is when my husband and I agreed that it would be his when we split our assets. So I don't use the place at all and he gives me money for the mortgage and the bills on it.
I do know that the insurance is for a second home, ie the insurance company know it is mostly unoccupied so I'm pretty sure it's the right sort of policy.
My husband couldn't buy me out at first because he's self employed and things were going very badly for his business so he didn't think he'd be able to take over the mortgage. We aren't divorced yet so we haven't done any formal sorting out of finances and this needs to be done but I guess that's a whole other thread. We each have our own houses but basically we sorted the financial stuff out on the back of an envelope.
I have been in touch with him recently and suggested that we get a mediator and get divorced and he responded very reasonably. We've got two kids and they use the cottage a lot with their dad. No marriage break up is easy but he and I are about as reasonable with each other as it gets.0
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