The FCA has published its long-awaited review of car finance: Our work on motor finance – final findings. This work began back in April 2017. News reporting has seized on the FCA's findings that commission structures give dealers an incentive to charge higher interest rates. For example: Car buyers overcharged £1,000 by dealers for loans, says watchdog. But here I am interested in the FCA's … [Read more...]
How to get a payday loan refund – with template letters that work
Did your payday loans cost so much you had to keep on borrowing? The regulator will say your loans were unaffordable and this was irresponsible lending. You can get a refund of the interest you paid on unaffordable loans. It's easy to ask for a payday loan refund using the free template letters here. The letters work if your payday loans were repaid or if you still owe money. This … [Read more...]
Barclays & Barclaycard refund thousands of customers in arrears
In 2018 Barclays started a major refund program to customers with overdrafts, loans or credit cards who had been charged interest when Barclays knew they were in financial difficulty. The Arrears assistance review page on Barclays website says: After a careful review, we found that from October 2013, we didn’t always provide the service we should have to some customers who were over their … [Read more...]
Refunds of interest from large, high cost loans & logbook loans
The repayments on many loans from bad credit lenders are too high to be manageable so people get deeper into debt trying to repay them. If you have an unaffordable loan, you can complain and ask for interest to be removed from your balance. If the loan has been settled, you can ask for a refund of the interest you paid. This article describes how to complain, with templates. It is a … [Read more...]
How to complain if you have got a guarantor loan
If you have been given a personal loan by a guarantor lender you can ask for interest to be removed from this loan if: you can't afford the repayments without hardship or borrowing more money, AND Amigo or any other lender would have realised this before they gave you the loan if they had checked properly. If you are the guarantor for someone else's loan, read Complaining if you are a … [Read more...]
How to complain if you are a guarantor for a loan
If you are a guarantor for a loan that you can't afford to pay without hardship, you can ask to be removed as the guarantor. A lender such as Amigo should check that a loan will be affordable for both the borrower and the guarantor before the loan starts and before any top-ups. But often proper checks have not been made. The regulator's definition of affordable is that you have to be able to … [Read more...]
A template letter to ask for a BrightHouse refund
BrightHouse announced in October 2017 that they were refunding nearly £15 million to customers who had been sold goods they couldn't afford. Which sounded great and there were lots of happy newspaper headlines... but I pointed out that actually most BrightHouse refunds are quite small and many people aren't getting one at all. BrightHouse's smaller rival, PerfectHome, announced a refund for … [Read more...]
PPI – complain now, even if you have been rejected!
In August 2017, the FCA launched a PPI advertising campaign, with an Arnold Schwarzenegger head telling you to make a decision about claiming PPI, because a deadline is being introduced in August 2019. This campaign is resulting in more people making complaints. In April 2018 the FCA published its complaints data for the banks and other firms it regulates and these show that: Complaints about … [Read more...]
Can you get a refund of interest on doorstep loans?
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...]
Can you get interest refunds from catalogues & credit cards?
Have you had a catalogue or a credit card where you were given a high credit limit? So high that the minimum repayments were hard to manage without borrowing more? Many people were originally given sensible limits, but the lender kept increasing them. Thousands of people got refunds from payday loan complaints in 2016, see How to get a payday loan refund for more information. Some people have … [Read more...]