welcome finance/ unwelcome - more like

[mojo8]

Afternoon

 

I have recently called welcome finance as we have a secured loan on our home.

 

 

my partners work has died a death and his income is a lot less than normal.

i called to ask if we could lower the payments for a while until his work picks up and there not even a slight bit interested.

 

 

this is a real concern for us now as we cannot meet the repayments and we are now worried about the house being re-possessed.

 

 

After reading through this forum,

firstly i cant belive how many people have been affected by welcome and considering the state of the country at the moment, how unhelpful they are.

I picked up a few different things from other posts that i am hoping may help us.

 

 

we took out our loan in 2005 for £12000,

i know that contract is wrong as it includes the acceptance fee in the loan amount before interest is calculated.

 

 

in 2006 we needed an extra £5000 so we approached them.

They did a new loan for £17k of which they took out what we owed from the previous loan,

they wrote themselves a cheque.

from what i have read it sounds like that may be ilegal to do.

 

 

What im hoping is that because the loan they paid off was incorrectley calculated because of the acceptance fee, thus making the settlement higher then we may have an argument to have this loan made unenforceable thus giving us some negotiation room.

 

 

To summerise my points:

 

1. is it ilegal for them to pay themselves and does this make the loan unenforceable.

 

2. because the origional loan was calculated wrong and that miscalculation was carried over, does that make the loan potentially unenforceable.

 

3. because it is a fixed sum loan secured on the house and not a mortgage where do we stand with regards to having our home re-possessed.

 

if anybody has any advice, i would be very grateful

[postggj]

i will try and answer some of your questions from experience.

will be corrected if wrong

 

as a rule, the same company cannot rewrite the loan

it can be a consolidation loan from another company, but not the same

 

welcome continue to do this, so they may have got around it.

i am awaiting a response from the fsa on that matter. i will post the reply when it arrives

 

as you have rewritten the loan, that cancells out the original. thats why welcome push for a new agreement, they do this also if they know the original agreement is crap.

 

your last question

 

welcome will go for a charging order

sp when you sell your house, welcome will get paid

 

all this house repo in the news is scare tacticts

 

that posserbility is a very long way off and can be easily defended if needed

 

read the welcome threads

there are some interesting developments and welcome will have to answer some very nasty questions in the very near future

[mojo8]

Hi all

 

I have posted a thread about welcome previously but still not sure what to do about it.

 

 

We are struggling with finances due to my partners severe downturn in work and are worried about the mortgage as well as everything else.

 

 

we called welcome to ask if we could reduce the payments by half for a 6 month period to enable us to consolidate and gain a bit of breathing space, they were not offhand or rude but said it was not possible.

 

 

Here is our story,

We borrowed £12k in 2005 and it was secured on the house,

however after reading some of these threads i now know that that agreement was 100% unenforceable,

however we applied for an extra £5000 in 2006.

 

 

The way the loan was done was that from the new loan of £17k

they cleared their own loan and paid off other debtors that we had,

we didnt actually see any of the money in our account.

 

 

The agreement paperwork is different from the previous agreement and it seems that all the prescribed terms are there, however im no expert.

 

 

The way welcome do there agreements is that it is on a top sheet (origional), the middle copy (the signing copy) and the bottom copy (the advance copy),

 

 

they write out the agreement and it should transfer onto the other copies.

the signing copy has all the information written in including our signatures so you would expect that the bottom copy that is sent out to you to ponder over for a week to have it all written in.

 

 

Its obvious looking at it that some of the information,

(the settlement figures and a tick mark indicating that we want the lifecare 24 product) were filled in on the other two copies after the bottom sheet was detached and sent to us,

in effect we did not have all the information to to make an informed decision.

 

 

The Lifecare 24 product is for £180,

this we did not ask for,

we were told we had to have life insurance to be elligable for the loan.

 

 

It is also a 5 year life insurance product but its a 10 year loan so surely this must be a mis-sell.

I would also have thought that it should at least state the flat rate of interest and not just the variable APR, there is a box for the rate of interest per annum but its not filled in.

 

 

We did not want to send welcome an SAR as we do not want them to get naughty if we end up defaulting.

 

My first question is,

1. should the advance copy have all the details of the loan included as at the top of the sheet it states (proposed loan agreement)

 

2. Should there be a flat rate of interest or is the APR sufficient to cover them.

 

3. We did not ask for the lifecare 24 but are now paying 10 years interest on a product that we did not want and only covers half the loan period.

 

we are trying to determine if it is worth going down the "unenforceable loan " route to help us negotiate with them. Any help would be much appreciated

[chaz2]

just looking through the agreement, it is "A fixed-sum loan agreement regulated by the consumer credit act 1974". at the bottom of the form it has the customer declaration and one of the points is

"You signed this agreement on our business premises"

The docs were sent to us through the post that we signed and sent back, does that affect our contract in any way. We signed it on the 8/07/06

[MARTIN3030]

will move your thread into legal.

[mojo8]

We found this site some time ago and it has been great for us as like a lot of families in the uk we are facing hard times.

 

 

My partners workload dropped off and as a consiquence his salary is very low.

We have sent out cca requests to capital 1 and the paperwork that has been returned has been a joke at best.

 

 

My concern is with welcome finance.

We missed our december payment due to lack of money as my partners work was so quiet and it looks like we will have to miss our january payments.

 

 

I spoke to our account manager at welcome and to be fair to him he has always been really good with us,

 

 

however on this occasion i was a bit put out with his response to our issues.

He firstly asked us to go into the office so they can look at re-writing the loan but i dismissed this straight away.

 

 

He insisted that our payment for january must be paid but i told him that looking at our salaries it looked unlikely.

 

 

He asked us if we are up to date on our mortgage and i told him

"Yes, he then told me not to pay my mortgage but to pay them instead as there loan is a secured mortgage and if we dont pay it will be sent through to there collections department.

 

 

I have no intention of not paying my mortgage and i find this response quite disturbing.

 

 

I would be very interested in anyones thoughts on this and if there is anything i can do about this as im sure they should not be advising people to not pay their mortgages.

thankyou

[supasnooper]

Any thoughts ?

 

Yes - do not speak to them on the phone again. Get everything done in writing as promises or agreements made over the phone are never what they seem.

 

Have you sent a CCA request to Welcome for the loan ?

 

Do not stop paying your mortgage so you can pay these Welcome.

Your martgage is a priority debt, not a Welcome loan.

[mojo8]

Hi and thanks for the prompt reply.

i have not sent these a CCA request as i did not want to rock the boat with them because of our missed payments and with it being a secured loan you always think the worst. We did talk about sending a cca last night and now seems like the right course of action to take. Ill get it done today, thanks again.

[082stewie]

Hi Mojo,

Welcome has a serious agenda at the moment. The share price is falling through the floor and they are becoming ever more aggressive to re-coup any monies.

They are in the process of laying off staff etc.

I spoke to my branch a few days ago and they were less than helpful. The guy I used to speak to who was always friendly and incompetent is now just incompetent. I suspect they will attempt to get a bit more cunning to try get you to pay.

As always Mortgage and council tax are at the top of any persons list.

Have you got PPI with these cowboys? If so post it up and get some feedback on how to get it refunded. Maybe use the refund to defer payments for a few months??

There is a gent on here with the handle postggj. Im sure he will give you some great advice!

Stewie:)

[postggj]

thanks for the complement stewie

 

mojo

 

do as advised

mortage and council tax are priority debts,

this is normal from welcome, end of the month, targets and commission

 

do you have the agreement to hand, if not we can get it

how old is the loan

can you post your agreement minus personel details, but leave in the figures, google photo bucket

 

NEVER RE-WRITE THE LOAN

 

if the old one is suspect, then its history if you do a new loan

 

a lot of welcome agreements are bog roll, muppetts filling them out

need to see it

 

good hunting

[mojo8]

thanks guys and just to back up what 082stewie said, postggi you are becoming a fantastic source of advice on this site for many people and you have given me sound advice in the past. my agreement is april 2006 but it does look pretty much ok but ill try and post it on the thread when i get home from work.

[mojo8]

Just browsing the net recently and came across this amnd thought it would be an interseting read for Welcome Finance customers.

 

Cattles suspends three directors

2 days ago

Sub-prime lender Cattles said it had suspended three directors after it emerged bad debt charges were likely to be higher than first thought.

The company, which operates as Welcome Finance, said it believed a "breakdown in internal controls" led to its impairment policies being applied incorrectly.

As a result of a review being carried out by Deloitte, Cattles said 2008 profits were likely to be substantially lower than its expectations on February 20, when it first warned of potential problems with bad debt provisions.

The second profits warning in a fortnight caused shares in the company to tumble another 55%. It warned the situation was likely to require it to enter into talks with its banks and bondholders, while brokers at Numis fear the firm will breach its banking covenants.

Cattles chief executive David Postings has taken direct control of Welcome Financial Services.

John Blake, managing director, Peter Miller, finance director, and Mick Belcher, operations director of Welcome Financial Services, have been suspended pending the outcome of a separate inquiry which is also being conducted by Deloitte.

Cattles annual results, which were due for release last week, have been delayed pending the review of its impairment policies.

It is the latest blow to the company, which last month conceded defeat in its long-running attempt to secure a licence for banking deposits.

Cattles, which is based in Batley, west Yorkshire, also said recently it was axing 1,000 jobs, including through the closure of an office in Hull, as it shrinks the business in line with reduced business volumes.

Cattles is currently in discussions with its lenders about the renewal of the group's bank facilities. The company, which serves individuals who may not have access to mainstream lending, is due to provide a progress report by the end of the first quarter of this year.

 

"What goes around, comes around" springs to mind here.

[mojo8]

Like many people on this forum, because of circumstancies we have encountered debt issues. We have sent out CCA`s to several companies and the majority have either not responded or sent worthless responses. My reason for this thread is that we have an agreement with welcome finance and we have a few arrears but as we are making full payments every month we dont seem to be harrassed for the arrears so we tread carefully around them so they dont harrass us for them. We have now decide to send an SAR for a copy of our agreement, statements and transcripts. I could just do with some information to try and get my head round my agreement. Our loan is for 17k

 

I need the answers in laymans terms please though.

 

1. What is the difference between regulated and unregulated and when did this procedure come into effect.

2. Our loan agreement has at the bottom of the page some points of which we should have agreed too, one of them being that we signed the documents at there office. We signed at home and sent it back through the post so does this have any implications on our agreement.

3. We have an insurance product on our agreement called "lifecare 24". This product is a five year life insurance product on a ten year agreement. What i cant understand is what use is a five year policy on a ten year agreement, could this be potentially be classed as a miss-sell and we dont have any policy docs for it.

4. The agreement itself looks ok but i seem to have lost my understanding of the acceptance fee but from what im reading am i safe to presume that it is not wrong to include it in the "total amount for credit".

5. I have been monitoring the catles issues all week my only worry is that if they go bust and welcome is closed down where do we stand with our agreements, can receivers call in the debts if they have arrears on them.

 

thanks, all your help is appreciated.

[cerberusalert]

Have a read through this thread http://www.consumeractiongroup.co.uk/forum/general-consumer-issues/109794-welcome-finance-28.html#post2030555 it's a bit long but you'll probably find the last few pages of interest.

 

It's an open thread so if you have any questions it's ok to post them there.

[mojo8]

This site is brilliant and should not be underestimated by anyone.

 

I am now goiung to send a SAR to welcome, something i was reluctant to do as we have a couple of arrears and were worried about them calling in the debt. I have taken the whole day read and digest everything but have found it a lot of info to take in. If someone would just clarify a few things in laymans terms then i would be very gratefull.

 

1. The statement of price that has been mentioned - am i legally entitled to this document in my SAR.

2. I have the lifecare 24 product on my loan but from postggi`s brilliant work it seems that all insurance policies have been mis-sold and makes agreements potentially unenforceable, am i correct in assuming this.

3. Do i need to SAR the insurance company to obtain any details of policies they have or dont have for me.

4. I was under the impression that a regulated agreement had to be signed on the companies premises, ours wasn`t, does this have any affect on the contract.

 

thankyou.

[postggj]

hi mojo

 

for a start

you are entitled to see all documents welcome hold on you

you need to do an sar on direct group, these people addminister the policies, i mean give it an air of respectability

then check with norwich union, give them a phone and see if they have any record of you

 

we all know the answer to that one

 

an agreement signed off the premises give a 14 day cooling off period

 

was this a personel loan/car/secured

[mojo8]

Hi postggi

thanks for the reply.

 

our loan is for 17000 and its secured on the house, i have checked the deeds and it does have an interst by progressive finance.

 

looking at the agreement it does on the surface look ok but after reading the statement of price section it has aroused my curiosity.

 

I have a policy document in front of me for the lifecare 24, it refers to norwich union as the underwriters and the administrators as direct group.

 

If these policies are bogus how will it affect my agreement?

do you have a number for norwich union as there is no number in the booklet.

thanks

[postggj]

ill dig out and pm you details

a few things need to be kept on the qt at the moment

 

one thing

 

did you apply direct to welcome or through a broker

[mojo8]

we applied directly to welcome, but never asked for insurance especially one that only runs for five years of a ten year agreement.

 

thanks postggi, your a godsend

[postggj]

01603622200

 

thats norwich union swithch board

 

ask to be put through to the dept that handles ppi policies on behalf of third parties

[postggj]

mojo

 

sending you a pm

[mojo8]

thanks postggi. Will get that in motion now. you have brought a big smile to my family and when my little boy is old enough to understand i will tell him the story of the legendry Postggi that roamed the forums helping people in there fights against the bad welcome.

ill keep you posted on what comes back to me.

[mojo8]

can a statement of price be requested from any finance company or is it specific to welcome

[mojo8]

I have just called Norwich union, apparently these are the underwriters of my life insurance policy that these muppets set up. First of all the customer service from NU was appalling, rude, none helpfull and all she kept saying was that they underwrite for a lot of companies and that i should cal welcome, it was though she had received many phone calls like this and was fed up with answering them. It was only after some argueing that i was put through to someone that could help, and guess what!.............they were was based in another country. Anyway they cannot find any details of any insurance product for me. Could just do with some advice on what to do next in relation to this policy. I have SAR`d welcome this morning.

[Dipply75]

I have just called Norwich union, apparently these are the underwriters of my life insurance policy that these muppets set up. First of all the customer service from NU was appalling, rude, none helpfull and all she kept saying was that they underwrite for a lot of companies and that i should cal welcome, it was though she had received many phone calls like this and was fed up with answering them. It was only after some argueing that i was put through to someone that could help, and guess what!.............they were was based in another country. Anyway they cannot find any details of any insurance product for me. Could just do with some advice on what to do next in relation to this policy. I have SAR`d welcome this morning.

 

Yup, send a complaint to the cheif executive of Norwich Union - complain about the behaviour and advice given by his authorised agent, who are nt taking your complaint seriously so you are asking them for an investigation.

 

You could also add in that Welcome refuse to give you proof an policy actually exists, just Welcme letterheaded gumf.

 

He is going to be getting a lot of these

 

Oh, and the statement of price is something that appeared in my and others paperwork from Welcome, but others did not get it. (mine was forged) - so I think it is a welcome only thing, but you definetely need this.