Six Year Wait For Claim

joeyramone

Hi guy’s, I need some help dealing with a claim firm that have had my claim for a ‘miss sold’ endowment mortgage for over six years. When those forecast letters started to hit people’s mail boxes telling them they’d be thousands of pounds short on their mortgages we, like millions of others, started to panic. What made it worse for us was that because of my spinal surgery we were now solely reliant on only the wife’s small wage coming in for us to get by on. So, after seeing a letter from a chap in a magazine saying that he’d used this firm in London (I do not want to name them yet) and successfully won his claim we thought we too would go with them.


But because of my illness and the fact that neither myself nor the wife are very good fighters, especially against firms that have the best lawyers on board, we agreed to use this firm to fight our claim for us. We clearly remember the financial advisor at the time telling, and showing, by the use of a big drawing pad, that we’d have lots of money left over to do with what we wanted. There are other things too but suffice to say there were enough things in our favour for this firm to take on our case.

This firm had different pay options as to how to pay for their services and because we didn’t have any up front money we chose something like they would take a third of whatever we made, or something like that. I’m being vague because it was such a long time ago and we had to fill in, sign and return the form that these charges were on back to them. Thus began our dealings with said firm.

At first the chap we were dealing with was literally a dynamo. He would ring you up on Saturday mornings or late Sunday night wanting more information or dates of when this or that happened. But whenever I’d ring the office (by the way I live in the North East) to speak to him to see how things were going there was always the secretary’s hand over the receiver and muffled voices before she’d sheepishly say he’d ring me back, but he never did.

I then used to get these totally out of the blue phone calls from him to say that our case was with the Ombudsman and he was very busy. I knew that he must be and accepted that I’d have to wait.

After five and a half frustrating years I contacted a local newspaper that ran a help page for disgruntled consumers. People that had had faulty goods or services and never really expected to hear anything, but lo and behold I did. I gave my details to him and waited. Surprise, surprise it worked. I got a phone call from him to thank me and saying this is just what might be needed to get the Ombudsman to get my case going again. But that’s as far as it went. After hearing nothing again I managed to speak through the Financial Ombudsman Service to the chap the was on our case. He said that Mr C****er was trying to win a case on something that wasn’t sold ( at the initial setting up of the mortgage the advisor said that because I was a labourer at the time I would not be able to get mortgage protection. Labourers were classed as temporary workers and therefore could not get this type of cover.) Mr C****er in his findings had found this not to be true and there was a firm at that time out there that did provide cover for labourers and that this chap should have known about it. I, the Ombudsman went on, only deal in things that have been sold, not in things that haven’t been sold and so Mr ? doesn’t have a case.

So that’s where we’re at. Its probably too late to go anywhere else. And if we did try we’d probably have to pay them for work done thus far, which we simply don’t have. I need some good advice as to what I can do now.

Any thoughts would be most welcome.

This guy and his firm have been on BBC RADIO 4'S MONEY BOX

cattie

Your post is confusing, the latter part, in smaller print, concerning speaking through the financial obudsman is focussing on mortgage protection insurance, that you hadn't actually taken out. Mortgage protection insurance is something completely separate from endowment mortgages & is an optional extra, something people elect to take or not take through choice.

You can't get redress for being misadvised on this kind of insurance, unless you actually took out such a policy that was totally inapropriate for you on advice of one of their advisors. All that would happen then would be a refund of premiums paid.

If you do actually have an endowment mortgage & feel you have a valid claim for being misold, why have you let it drag on for so long with a company that appeared to be doing nothing for you?

joeyramone

Thanks for replying cattie. I’m very sorry for the confusion and the small print. The latter seems to have happened after I copied the words Financial Ombudsman Service from an email I had with it on and I never checked the rest of my post before I sent it. oops. as you can see it is my first post and I’m just learning. The endowment part of it concerns the salesman advising us to forget repayment mortgages and to take out an endowment one as that would mean that we’d have this big pot of cash left over at the end of it to do with as we please.

We thought that this company was focusing on that and all the evidence we supplied, including that it had been taken out over twenty nine years instead of twenty five that we had a reasonable case to answer. So that is why we are a little confused to find out from the Ombudsman that Mr C***er is fighting for an insurance policy that wasn’t taken out and not with all the other information he has been given to go on is quite beyond me. And like I said in my earlier post. He’s either never in the office, which is very suspect or it would cost us money we haven’t got to go somewhere else and that is even if somebody else would take on the case at such a late date.
I need to be able to say to the firm exactly the right thing to get them to fight my claim on the information supplied and not on some mortgage protection cover that wasn’t even taken out.

If anymore info is required please ask.