MSE News: Regulator pledges to help 30,000 'mortgage prisoners'

Former_MSE_Callum

The financial regulator has said that it wants to find ways to help 30,000 'mortgage prisoners' who are unable to switch to new and better deals - after years of campaigning by MoneySavingExpert...

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'Regulator pledges to help 30,000 'mortgage prisoners''

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michaels

Surely it may affect anyone who took out a mortgage before 2014 when the affordability rules changed not just those who took out a mortgage before 2008?

Thrugelmir

A third of all mortgage lenders disappeared from the market during the GFC. People who had mortgages sold on with these lenders. Where the new owner aren't regulated for new business. Are locked into their existing t&c's with little scope for moving elsewhere. There's enough business for a few lenders to offer an alternative product.

GraceCourt

Our home is worth £700k+ and we have a mortgage of under £300k. We have £350k+ of equity in four other properties, one of which is our retirement home, which we will own outright in less than five years.

We have no other debts of any sort, impeccable credit records, and about £15k on deposit for any emergencies, £10k of which is on deposit with Santander UK PLC, who took over our mortgage from Abbey National Building Society. However, although my wife and I are retired, we cannot move to our retirement home because my wife is her 94-year-old mother's carer, and as our interest-only mortgage (which we are over-paying by £500/month voluntarily by BACS, because Santander refuses to take more than the monthly interest by Direct Debit!) came to the end of its term over two years ago, Santander have been repeatedly threatening to repossess our current home for the last two years. There are, of course, no arrears and there never have been.

Yes, we are mortgage prisoners, and if we weren't prepared to stand up to Santander's outrageous bullying, we'd have to sell up, move 500 miles away, and abandon my mother-in-law to the care of the State. Santander's response? Yet another threat of repossession.

We're advised that no District Judge would grant possession in these circumstances, especially as Santander have admitted losing at least some of our correspondence since the threats started two years ago, but that doesn't seem to change anything... as far as the rules are concerned, we "can't afford a new mortgage" - "the computer says no"!

Utter, utter madness!

stingey

The exact same thing happened with us in 2014 with NRAM. We were selling our old home with a £180,000 mortgage wanting to port to a £90,000. I had beeen made redudant twice in a short time and had started work again, we thought it prudent to get a smaller mortgage based on my husband's wage incase redundancy happened again. I couldn't get a mortgage yet as I was still in probationary for 6 months and we just had the only offer on the property in a year. We didn't want to lose this sale.

Even though we were maintaining our mortgage payments and all other financial commitments NRAM said no as the new affordability checks had came in and basically the computer said no. 1 person applying but we would have had 2 incomes into the house, we asked for this to be taken into consideration, still no.

The result was we sold the house and repaid the mortgage in full, which tbh didn't benefit NRAM from a business sense, they could have had another 25 years of someone paying interest!

Nuts.

Roy_Robart

I urge anyone in this position to join the closed version of the Facebook action group "Mortgage Prisoners UK". We are getting real traction with the media.