If your fixed mortgage has ended, or will soon, you could face a large increase in your mortgage payments. Most mortgage revert to their lender's Standard Variable Rate (SVR) when a fix ends. In summer 2019, the average SVR is 4.9%. You can get much cheaper fixes than that! This affects a lot of people. In October 2019, fixed rate mortgages worth £26billion are coming to an end. More than … [Read more...]
83% of guarantor loan cases won at Financial Ombusdman
The Financial Ombudsman (FOS) complaint statistics for April-Jun 2019 have just been published, see Product Complaints Data. For guarantor loans, FOS decided in favour of the consumer in 83% of cases. That is a dramatic increase from the uphold rate of only 32% for the previous financial year I have been saying for several months that almost all affordability complaints by both … [Read more...]
How to complain if you have got a guarantor loan
Amigo and other guarantor loans are very expensive and the lender often doesn't check properly that you will be able to manage the loan repayments without having to borrow more. If proper checks would have shown that you couldn't afford the repayments, complain! There is a template letter in this article for you to use. You can get a refund of the interest you have paid, or an existing loan … [Read more...]
How to complain when you are the guarantor for a loan
If you are a guarantor for a loan you can ask to be removed as the guarantor: if you couldn't really afford to repay the loan without difficulty; or you were pressured into becoming the guarantor; or you didn't understand the implications of being a guarantor. A lender such as Amigo should have checked that a loan will be affordable for both the borrower and the guarantor before the … [Read more...]
Debt news – August 18
In a quiet week, my two top picks are my article on UK credit records & scores and the Times article - unfortunately behind a paywall - on Hostile environment: immigration system keeps families like ours in debt. Debt news CRUEL UNIFORM Payday lenders are targeting skint parents and charging 1,333% interest on children’s school gear Sun: The loan shark-style firms’ websites feature … [Read more...]
Will the Money Shop really pay 80% of your payday loan refund?
On August 14, people who had borrowed from the Money Shop, Payday UK or Payday Express started to receive emails from Instant Cash Loans (ICL), the company that owns these payday lender brands. The email asks customers to vote to approve a Scheme of Arrangement. I have updated my Money Shop LATEST NEWS page with details of the Scheme and the voting arrangements. The Scheme limits the money … [Read more...]
Money Shop, Payday UK & Payday Express LATEST NEWS
On 14 August, Instant Cash Loans (ICL) started sending out emails to 2.6million customers of the Money Shop, Payday UK, Payday Express and Ladder Loans with details about how to vote on its proposed Scheme of Arrangement. It says customers with an affordability complaint may get 80% of the value of their complaint paid out, but this may be significantly less if a lot of people claim. 80% … [Read more...]
UK credit records & scores – not fit for purpose!
The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has recently started a Credit Information Market Study. In the consultation on its terms of reference, the FCA is asking: Do you consider that the credit information market is working well? I don't think it is. It has grown up over the years into a poorly understood, complex system which has many problems. It isn't working well for consumers or … [Read more...]
How to ask QuickQuid for a payday loan refund
QuickQuid (QQ) and its smaller brand Pounds To Pocket (P2P), which in February 2019 rebranded as On Stride, have been getting large numbers of affordability complaints from customers asking for refunds of interest. You may be able to get a refund if you had loans from QQ, P2P or On Stride you couldn't repay without borrowing again. You can get refunds for all type of loans, including instalment … [Read more...]
Debt news – August 11
The quiet announcement that CAP isn't taking on any new debt clients until 2020 has come as a shock to the sector. Tweet of the week I’ve only spent 25 years stopping thousands of Glaswegians being evicted or repossessed from their homes. Got £1.7bn back in bank charges for free. Wrote the payday loan & bedroom tax guides that were downloaded hundreds of thousands of times. Yet GCC … [Read more...]
Provident – a template letter to ask for a refund
If you had doorstep loans from lender such as Provident, you may be able to get a refund of the interest you paid if the lender should have realised the loan was unaffordable for you. Doorstep lending - also called home credit - is where a collector comes to your house to collect the repayments. Doorstep loans are used by over 1.3 million people in Britain. The four largest lenders are … [Read more...]
Wonga – Latest News about refunds (updated August 2019)
Wonga stopped lending and went into administration on 30 August 2018, unable to pay refunds on all the payday loan affordability complaints it was getting. An unaffordable payday loan is one you could only manage to repay if you borrowed more elsewhere or didn't pay some bills. So you may have repaid a loan but still be able to claim a refund of the interest you paid if the loan was … [Read more...]
“Lender says I lied – what should I do?”
Some lenders responding to affordability complaints by saying your application wasn't accurate about your income or expenses when you took out the loans. They are doing this to try to put you off taking your case to the Financial Ombudsman. That may save them a lot of money! Let's see why applications may have been inaccurate and whether this is a problem for your complaint. The quotes … [Read more...]
Amigo – why the Ombudsman released a guarantor from a loan
The Financial Ombudsman (FOS) has recently published two important decisions about guarantor loans, one where a borrower complained and one where the guarantor complained. I have covered the borrower case here: Ombudsman – Amigo did not check properly that a borrower could afford the loan. This article looks at the FOS decision about the guarantor for a loan. I have selected points from the … [Read more...]
Debt news – August 4
My pick of last week's news is one you may not have read Have retirement interest-only mortgages flopped? Tweet of the week I have absolutely zero sympathy for banks. They brought it on themselves. Had they dealt with PPI when concerns were first raised about sales process, then dealt with complaints properly, then didn’t fight tooth and nail against payouts...they mightn’t be in this … [Read more...]
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