Initiating a complaint about an endowment’s performance

Sneil

Thank you for laying out your predicament: we have very similar experience (although we could not prove miss-selling) and would be keen to know how and if you progress the issue.

AnotherJoe

1) You say I'm not "cut out" to be investing. Okay, that's a subjective view. You may well be right. But here's the objective reality. We were first-time home buyers in 1992, and ones who were keen to secure a mortgage with the Woolwich especially (it had a very strong market reputation at the time, also my extended family had a considerable family history with them). We were wrongly told (and this was established years later in our complaint) that as first time buyers we could only be approved for an endowment mortgage; there was no choice about a standard repayment option (or so we were told). We were pretty open-minded about the issue but we were rather propelled down the endowment avenue. We were simply keen to deal with the Woolwich more than anything else. We trusted them. The Ombudsman later found that we had in fact been mis-sold the product.
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Ditto here re endowments, and indeed you already got compensation for the misselling. Now you want a second bite at the cherry. After the compo, you could have stopped contributing, taken the money and put it into another investment vehicle of your choice including a savinsg account. You were not bound to stick with this endowment but you did.

There are thousands of shares and funds and various similar investments. Some will do well, some will do badly. Are you arguing that everyone whose fund/shares do not achieve some particular level of increasing performance (which would be what? ) should be compensated? If not, then dont take this the wrong way but whats so special about you that you want compensation for a fund not doing as well as you wish?

I mean that seriously, everyone has wins and losses so why do you in particular want compensation? No one forced you to remain with this one. I've had a couple of mediocre endowments, balanced by some spectacular gains on the stock market, (10x-20x my initial investment), and some equally spectacular massive clunkers including pretty much complete wipeouts. If only i could claim compo for all those that went belly up (actually I am claiming on one but that is a fraud case currently going on, another story....) how well I'd be doing.

So, can you summarise what your case is, once it was established you were missold and got compensation, eg after that point? Why did you hang on? If you expected ever increasing rises, which I think you do, then i stand by my original statement, you arent cut out to be investing.

Sneil

No doubt GWAM will be replying.....I, too, am not 'cut out to be investing': if I were, I would be in a different profession, relishing the cut and thrust of finance. What I did try to do was simply buy a house for myself and family, not play the markets, entrusting an (allegedly) reputable company to deliver some of the outcomes its product purported to offer and for which I have paid a not insignificant 'management fee' to...well...manage it, with the interests of its customers not the least of its priorities.That it has, in my case, missed its target by 50% suggests to me that that product is not fit for purpose...or that the management thereof was/is derelict.
I won't bore you with the exchanges of correspondence I have had with the company (upon which I will keep my own counsel) in which it continued to expound its investment prowess and anticipated returns until, as GWAM has experienced, a spectacular slow down (to zero) in return over the last 2-3 years as we approach maturity.

Thrugelmir

Sneil wrote: »

, a spectacular slow down (to zero) in return over the last 2-3 years as we approach maturity.

Low inflation though over the same time frame. Public sector pensions received 0% increase this April. As the CPI index was static last September. Not normal times with central banks financially engineering the economies of the world.

dunstonh

That it has, in my case, missed its target by 50% suggests to me that that product is not fit for purpose...or that the management thereof was/is derelict.

It is neither as the risk warnings said that you may not get back what you paid in and it could fall short. For decades they paid out surpluses. However, you have had two crashes of the scale that is only normally seen once in a generation in the last 15 years.

a spectacular slow down (to zero) in return over the last 2-3 years as we approach maturity.

Not unexpected given market returns over that period. A stockmarket crash last Autumn that has yet to recover put it back to where it was 3 years earlier.

AnotherJoe

Sneil wrote: »

No doubt GWAM will be replying.....I, too, am not 'cut out to be investing': if I were, I would be in a different profession, relishing the cut and thrust of finance. What I did try to do was simply buy a house for myself and family, not play the markets, entrusting an (allegedly) reputable company to deliver some of the outcomes its product purported to offer and for which I have paid a not insignificant 'management fee' to...well...manage it, with the interests of its customers not the least of its priorities.That it has, in my case, missed its target by 50% suggests to me that that product is not fit for purpose...or that the management thereof was/is derelict.
I won't bore you with the exchanges of correspondence I have had with the company (upon which I will keep my own counsel) in which it continued to expound its investment prowess and anticipated returns until, as GWAM has experienced, a spectacular slow down (to zero) in return over the last 2-3 years as we approach maturity.

But you did "play the markets" by virtue of buying a product that relied upon investments rather than savings. You even refer to investment prowess of the third party you employed so why then claim you weren't involved with the market?!

By virtue of that, you cant expect to be immune from the ups and downs of an investment product yet you do appear to believe it should be up all the way, something that's impossible.

So yep, you also should not be using this type of product (I wonder what you are doing for a pension?) re your product in respect of whats happened over the past few years zero isn't bad at all. If this is unacceptable then a standard repayment mortgage was the product for you and you bought the wrong thing.

(There was nothing "spectacular" about a slow down to zero either, that was fairly average performance, the issue is you bought the wrong product and ignored the warnings).