cynicalAt the beginning of September I suffered an injury to my arm which meant that I was out of work for six weeks, I'm still not fully recovered but am ok for light duties. As my company pays for 4 weeks at normal pay under a sick note, I was on statury (sp?)sick pay for 2 weeks with a complete loss of the three days I missed before the sick note came into effect (British people should know what I mean, I have no idea how this works in America). Due to this we are left a little short of money so we decide to activate the PPI on the loan for this month so we can get ourselves sorted, only to be told that the PPI only covers the first name on the agreement. I'll admit that we probably should have paid more attention to the paperwork but we were naive and took the word of the woman who sold us the PPI.
The next move for us was to cancel the PPI as it is useless to us if it does not cover me (hubbys job is salaried and if he looses it he intends on becoming self employed, my wage is hourly and we need every hour I can get). We apply to Halifax to have the PPI cancelled and are told that we would have to take out a new loan, pay off the existing loan and cancel the PPI. Fair enough, that's allowed by the FSA so we go into the branch this morning, only to be told that the interest rate on the loan this time round (without the PPI) would be nearly double the rate we are paying now (16.9% compared to 8.9%) and the repayments would work out to be £3 a month more than we are paying now with the PPI. (Hubby and I are of the opinion that this is set up so that most people will think that they are better off remaining as they are). To add insult to injury I looked up Halifaxs online loan rates and found them to be 6.9%, I understand that there can be differences between the online rates and the branch rates but that much?
At this point we are considering legal advice and have pretty much decided to take out a loan with another company to pay off the Halifax loan, we have also decided that if his can be done to switch out accounts to a different company entirely as we have had enough of the bullshit that Halifax is feeding us. I was wondering if anyone else has had issues with this type of problem and what steps were taken to solve it. I have been reading a lot on the Martin Lewis website http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/ and I am getting more and more annoyed with the whole situation. (As a side note the Martin Lewis website advises that we were sold a Single Premium Policy which I understand from the site to be a no no anyway)