Shall We Talk About Endowments?
Today was, to be frank, tedious and, if I’m not careful, this post will be too. The story so far…
Last August, just on the deadline, we submitted a whole heap of queries about potentially mis-sold payment protection insurance (PPI) policies. Essentially we sent a query in to every financial organisation we’ve had dealings with since 1985 where there was a reasonable chance we might get something out of it. Some chances were more reasonable than others, of course, and the key ones were mortgage providers. For a while, not much happened, but then we started getting responses from some of them. One former mortgage provider went through some straightforward process and paid out £3000, most of which was interest. Thank you! and it went straight into retirement savings.
However one of companies didn’t make any reply at all, not even a holding acknowledgement. So I ‘phoned them in January and they said they could find no record of me complaining. Since the laptop I complained on is borked, I couldn’t pull up the screenshots as proof, so I wrote it off (yes, I backed that laptop up regularly, but the timing was unfortunate).
But.
A month or so later, a different part of the same organisation that could find no record of us, sent a questionnaire looking for more info. about our query, which had been upgraded to a complaint. In the strange way this works, that indicates they think there is something to complain about, and it’s therefore a good sign. So I replied as best as I could.
Crickets, and a couple of holding letters which, given the virus, I was content to let ride.
And then, out of the blue, a longer letter arrived asking whether, in addition to the mortgages we had with this company, we had intended to complain also about the endowment policies as well. Hello? It was news to us that we could. So the source of the tedium today was digging out any scraps of evidence that might be lurking in old box files from 1985 and 1987 from our first and second flats, filling in more questionnaires, and finalising a long explanatory cover letter.
Most of the information I provided over several hours today is exactly the same information that I’ve already given them, but I reckon it’s worthwhile if there might be some money at the end of it. So it’s all in the post to them now.
Other exciting activities today included painting samples of stain onto scrap wood to decide which one I want for the shed, and making supper. Until I sat down to write this, I hadn’t even listened to any music (but I’m listening to the Byrds now, so that’s OK).
And that’s it. I have a taste for a whisky…
***
Music. In recognition that this PPI business is probably just as tedious for the poor employees slogging through a backlog of their predecessors errors, tonight’s music is from the excellent I Ludicrous, of whom I don’t expect my regular readers to have heard.
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