Over-payment interval changed for mortgage transferred from Tesco to Halifax

terryburton

Hi,

I have a mortgage that was originally with Tesco but was automatically transferred to Halifax when Tesco exited the mortgage game.

There was no problem for the first year, however recently they transferred all former Tesco mortgages onto the Halifax computer system. In doing so they have changed the effective start/end dates for the year over which over-payments are calculated before incurring an Early Repayment Charge.

My mortgage contract says that the term is based on the anniversary date of the mortgage start date, whereas now the Halifax system calculates it by calendar year. This disadvantages me because I am in a fortunate enough position for max out the over-payment at the start of the next period, which should be in just two months time - however now I am told that I will attract an automatic ERC if I make this payment before January 2022.

Halifax agree that this places a small number of customers at a disadvantage and that after the charge has been applied I can challenge it, it will be manually reviewed and then removed or recalculated, at their discretion. Clearly the number of customers that they expect to complain is too small for them to be bothered to update their computer systems to reflect the imported mortgage terms.

So whilst they are (almost) saying that they will honour the terms of the mortgage, the onus is on me to expend time and energy each year to get them to put right what their system will do wrong. Additionally, the telephone agent says that they will be unable to tell me exactly how much I can overpay the mortgage by at any point in time because their system does not represent the terms accurately, which is a further (minor) inconvenience.

I want to avoid having this headache every year for the next several years, so is there anything that I can do to avoid this? It seems that I will have to wait until I have actually been disadvantaged before I can escalate my complain to the ombudsman.


Thanks,

Terry

Thrugelmir

Complaining to the ombudsman is going to achieve absolutely nothing. The Halifax cannot alter their computer system just to accommodate you. That's the bottom line. When the mortgage reaches the end of it's fixed term. Either remortgage to a new lender or switch to a Halifax product. Using an Excel spreadsheet should be easy enough to monitor what you can overpay by in the meantime.  

[Deleted User]

Offering to manually remove any charges incurred would be sufficient and reasonable to an ombudsman. 

Asking them to spend millions redesigning an IT system to accompate a handful of people is certainly not reasonable 

getmore4less

What they could do is reset everyone to zero overpayments for calender year rather than carry over the previous overpayments so further overpayments go over.

Anything overpayed last year would not count.

terryburton

getmore4less said:

What they could do is reset everyone to zero overpayments for calender year rather than carry over the previous overpayments so further overpayments go over.

That is a worthwhile minor tweak that they could make, and I would have hoped that they had already considered.

Halifax administrated the mortgages on the inherited system for more that a year before migrating the accounts. So this is really a cost-saving and simplification measure that has placed burden on their customers my amending the way that they must interact with the product due to newly introduced deficiencies.