Halifax Not Reducing Term With Overpayment

fozzie55

Sounds more of of a case of making a mountain out of a molehill. 

Do you have a mortgage? BTW, I have never ever thought about or mentioned compensation at all. I just wanted my overpayments to reduce my term as agreed. Not a molehill, a financial institution changing its rules to benefit itself, not the consumer.

RelievedSheff

Our mortgage is with the Halifax. Every May on the anniversary of us taking out the mortgage they recalculate our repayment to take account of our over payments. 

I go online and change the mortgage repayment amount back to the amount we currently pay. It takes the whole of 5 minutes tops. No need to talk to anyone or spend 90 minutes on the phone. In effect it means that our over payment increases every year.

zenshi

RelievedSheff said:

Our mortgage is with the Halifax. Every May on the anniversary of us taking out the mortgage they recalculate our repayment to take account of our over payments. 

I go online and change the mortgage repayment amount back to the amount we currently pay. It takes the whole of 5 minutes tops. No need to talk to anyone or spend 90 minutes on the phone. In effect it means that our over payment increases every year.

Are you on fixed term repayment? Apparently my monthly payment is being recalculated in June because I paid 10% overpayment in one go and I’d rather it wasn’t

TheBlueVoice

I have this with Halifax as well.

First year I complained and they just changed the term to keep the repayment the same saying I could do that every year as it would happen every year. I received a letter saying that I had agreed to waiving affordability meeting etc. This time though I had to go through the whole interview, bank statements, financial checking etc. They wouldn't budge.  All the online meetings took a couple of hours..

Eventually the term is reduced.

They said that they had changed their policy and no longer allowed the process to be waived.

My online options on the Halifax site do not show any option to change monthly repayment..

The upside to this is it allows me to up the repayment enough each year so that I can keep repaying the same overall amount (std repayment + over payment) by upping the std repayment and decreasing the over payment.
Thus my overpayments for the next year don't go over the 10% of the years' starting balance..
It'll do for the next few years until the fixed term ends anyway.

  

RelievedSheff

zenshi said:

RelievedSheff said:

Our mortgage is with the Halifax. Every May on the anniversary of us taking out the mortgage they recalculate our repayment to take account of our over payments. 

I go online and change the mortgage repayment amount back to the amount we currently pay. It takes the whole of 5 minutes tops. No need to talk to anyone or spend 90 minutes on the phone. In effect it means that our over payment increases every year.

Are you on fixed term repayment? Apparently my monthly payment is being recalculated in June because I paid 10% overpayment in one go and I’d rather it wasn’t

Yes we are.

Just change the repayment again in your online account.

penners324

the_discussion said:

We had the same problem. Frankly, it is awful. 

From our experience, I would highly recommend folks to stay away from Halifax as a mortgage provider if you wish to make overpayments and have control over how they impact your mortgage.

We had a previous provider - Nationwide - who were excellent. You could do it all online on the app and you selected how the overpayment worked (reduce term or reduce monthly payments). It took seconds.

We switched to Halifax around a year ago. When we joined we checked that it was possible to make overpayments to reduce the term and received assurance that it was indeed straightforward. 

Ahead of making an overpayment, we again clarified online and over the phone, that we would be looking to reduce the term. We were told it's easy. Just phone up after making the payment. 

It is all lies.

Eventually, after a prolonged phone call, we discover that they insist on forcing you through a meeting with a mortgage advisor lasting 90 minutes. They shove unwanted marketing down your throat throughout the whole experience, often using very high pressure tactics to try to get you to commit to new life insurance or critical illness cover etc. They insist on going through all your finances, pay etc even though the amount you pay per month is not changing and you are taking on no additional obligations. The whole process took about 2 hrs of our time, both of us.

And if we want to make future overpayments we will have to do the same thing all over again!

Of course it is deliberately done to protect their income stream.

Honestly, I shall be looking to switch out of our Halifax mortgage at the earliest opportunity. 

I had a Halifax mortgage. I just sent the overpayments to them. I think they changed the payment at the end the year. I just upped the over payment.

Paid by overpayments by standing order

the_discussion

penners324 said:

the_discussion said:

We had the same problem. Frankly, it is awful. 

From our experience, I would highly recommend folks to stay away from Halifax as a mortgage provider if you wish to make overpayments and have control over how they impact your mortgage.

We had a previous provider - Nationwide - who were excellent. You could do it all online on the app and you selected how the overpayment worked (reduce term or reduce monthly payments). It took seconds.

We switched to Halifax around a year ago. When we joined we checked that it was possible to make overpayments to reduce the term and received assurance that it was indeed straightforward. 

Ahead of making an overpayment, we again clarified online and over the phone, that we would be looking to reduce the term. We were told it's easy. Just phone up after making the payment. 

It is all lies.

Eventually, after a prolonged phone call, we discover that they insist on forcing you through a meeting with a mortgage advisor lasting 90 minutes. They shove unwanted marketing down your throat throughout the whole experience, often using very high pressure tactics to try to get you to commit to new life insurance or critical illness cover etc. They insist on going through all your finances, pay etc even though the amount you pay per month is not changing and you are taking on no additional obligations. The whole process took about 2 hrs of our time, both of us.

And if we want to make future overpayments we will have to do the same thing all over again!

Of course it is deliberately done to protect their income stream.

Honestly, I shall be looking to switch out of our Halifax mortgage at the earliest opportunity. 

I had a Halifax mortgage. I just sent the overpayments to them. I think they changed the payment at the end the year. I just upped the over payment.

Paid by overpayments by standing order

Interesting workaround, but in theory this will eventually backfire because you'll reach a point where you cannot make further overpayments without going above the 10% limit. Then you'll need to reduce the term and I suspect you may run into the problems myself and others have encountered. Good luck when that happens!

We made our overpayment as a single one-off sum, which is what we like to try to do at the end of each 12 month period of the mortgage. We prefer not to make overpayment by standing order as we use anything extra each month to accrue savings.

Either way, the process of making an overpayment should be simple - do you want to reduce the monthly repayments, or do you want to reduce the term? Give the customer control, as other mortgage providers do. Halifax's conduct is clearly out of line here.

They also appear to be a bit of an outlier with this. I know that with at least two other mortgage providers (Nationwide and Santander) you can do this online or via the App in a matter of a minute or so. Completely painless. I don't know of any other mortgage provider that do anything like this obstructive 90 minute online meeting that Halifax insist on.

the_discussion

fozzie55 said:

Just to re-emphasise what happened to us (still bitter ). When we took out our mortgage with Halifax, we specifically asked that any overpayments we made would reduce the term, not the monthly payments. We wanted to finish the mortgage before retirement, paying the same monthly payments. They said of course our term would be reduced. This never happened, they wanted to recalculate our monthly payment down and keep the term the same unless we had this re-mortgage application meeting!

Fozzie55 - I feel your pain. We did exactly the same - checked with Halifax about overpayments reducing the term, not the monthly repayments, and received assurances that we could do this. 

Except that's not how they operate in reality. It is deceptive/misleading practice.

the_discussion

BikingBud said:

Hoenir said:

And the relevance to the opening post is? 

The link seems quite obvious, the OP has a complaint about how they have been treated by Halifax. 

Initially you tried to slam the OP asserting there were no grounds for complaint, and more recently you characterised the legitimate objections raised by customers as "conspiracy theories".

Recent direction from the FCA requires that financial firms ensure the outcomes are in the customers' best interest.  It would appear that Halifax are not operating in the customers' best interest, one might reasonably deduce that is why they have back pedalled when customers have been clear, robust and persistent in their position. Did you read that FCA direction by the way?

It seems that in the absence of a demonstrable lenders obligation and despite a number of customers having been subject to the 90 minute hard sell but getting the outcome they intended, you now want to try and divert rather than provide any evidence.

Do you work for Halifax?

That was exactly my thought.