Secured Loan confusion, advice needed please!,

Chinga

Hi All,

I'm looking for any advice people can offer, I'm new on here so apologies if im posting on the wrong forum.

We very stupidly took out a secured loan with Welcome Finance back in 2008 for £15,000. We have since been making our monthly payments of £323 each month without fail. So have so far paid back nearly £25K!!!

However as we are currently going through the process of re-mortgaging we decided to look at paying this loan off and just getting rid of it altogether, We requested a settlement figure 3 years ago but we're not in a position to pay the £10K settlement figure we were given. So as you can imagine I nearly fell off my chair when we were given a settlement figure today of £10,500!!!! That will be over £35K we will have paid back and that's not even full term.......madness!!!

But that's not what has me confused, mad has hell granted but not confused!!

It has come to light whilst going through the remortgage process that the secured loan with Welcome Finance is neither showing on our credit file or registered with the land registry????

So could anyone offer any advice on where this now leaves us?

Is this loan now an unsecured loan as they have failed to register with the land registry?

Do they have a set amount of time to register the loan with the land registry or can they suddenly decide to do that now?

Any thoughts/past experience of this magic £10K settlement figure that doesn't seem to ever reduce?

Any advice will be much appreciated, thank you in advance for any help/advice offered.

Pixie5740

What is the interest rate and term of your secured loan?

Are you checking the public land registry? Not all charges and restrictions are registered on the public land registry. A solicitor could view them using Land Registry Direct though.

Have you checked all 3 of your credit files? Have you ever defaulted on this loan?

Chinga

Hi, thanks for the reply.

The loan was taken out over 10 years and we are currently looking for the original paperwork to establish the interest rate, it was obviously ridiculously high though by the sounds of it.
No we have never defaulted on the loan, every payment has been made on time.

We have checked with the land registry via phone after the company who are arranging our remortgage stated the WF loan was not registered against the property. They confirmed that there was no record of a charge against the property by WF. So I'm not sure if that is public land registry or not???

All 3 credit files have been checked and it doesn't appear on any of them. After doing a bit of research on Google it seems that WF no longer report to credit reference agencies on active accounts........which in itself seems very strange to me.

Pixie5740

That is odd.

I think a lot of these secured loans have variable interest rates and the only way they vary is up.

Chinga

It certainly sounds like it yes lol

What is concerning though is this £10K settlement figure, we were under the impression that it was just a straight forward repayment loan but it doesn't appear to be going down

Land_Registry

There is only one land register for England and Wales and you can view/download a copy of the register for the property online for £3.

The same data is available to citizen customers and conveyancers so if the charge had been registered against the title then it would be revealed on the register, which is open to all. The online service has been available for 7/8 years now

Land Registry Direct is an 'old' electronic service which was withdrawn a number of years ago.

Chinga

Hi, Thank you so much for that.

Would you be able to advise me on whether there is a certain time limit a company has to register a charge against a property when a secured loan is taken out.
For instance our loan was taken out in 2008, the charge against the property has never been registered, could they do this now or should they have done it at the time?

Land_Registry

Chinga - normal conveyancing protocols put a 2 month period as the norm for registration re such matters.

However interests can really be registered at any time provided they are still effective in law so for example they could apply now to have it registered, explain why they failed to do so at the time and provided it is still registerable then the register can be updated.

Chinga

Thank you so much for your response. That at least settles that query.