Problems with Woolwich Mortgage not counting overpayments

RLH33

Hiya

Just thought I would post this to warn any people who are with the Woolwich and currently overpaying their mortgage. We have been doing this for the last 6 months and we get a letter from the Woolwich every time the interest rate goes up or down which tells us the new payment and a total amount owed.

I received one of these letters last week but just happened to have the last letter knocking about so compared them. To my total shock I found that even though we have been heavily overpaying our mortgage it was only registering that we had paid off £400 in the last six months.

Panicky phone call to the Woolwich resulted in me being told you pay off the interest first then the capital?? Then got cut off twice before I decided to ring my financial adviser. He also couldn't understand it but rang the Woolwich, was told too lots of conflicting information but found out that not only was my mortgage a lot lower than they were telling ME but also that the monthly payments they were quoting me in a letter LAST WEEK were also wrong and should have been lower.

Strong letter of complaint is in the post but I am shocked that if I hadn't by chance compared the letters and then got my Adviser involved I would probably have been completely unaware of the problem and also not got to the bottom of it.

Moral of the story - if you have a mortgage with the Woolwich and are overpaying it make sure that the payments are actually coming off the capital and that when the interest rate changes your monthly rate also changes to the CORRECT amount. Adviser was told by the Woolwich that my experience is apparently a 'problem' they know about which means lots of other people are also probably being sent incorrect info and are paying the wrong monthly payment.

robnye

woolwich are a bunch of total winkers.....
i had run in swith them many years ago, and they dont seem to have changed a bit.

is it possible that they dont recaculate the remaining balance until the end of the year....... therefore they are gaining the benefit of your extra payments until then

petermb_2

Please be aware that Woolwich are not the only lender who get such things confused shall we say. Many will totally disregard your overpayment and then finally add it to your account at the end of the year. By doing this they are still charging you maximum interest while making interest on your money until they allocate it to your account. We have seen a number of examples of this. Of course one or two lenders have misplaced the overpayments altogether. Borrowers have then often gone years without knowing that their money has been lost in the ether of the banks bulging profits and then have to start fighting to recover it.