Birmingham Midshires threatening repossession

[brighteyes24]

Hi all

 

Can someone help me please. We have had a BM solution mortgage since about 2004 and have never missed a payment. OH lost his job in March and is owed about £3k and he has applied for 350+ jobs but there's nothing out there. He's on contribution based JSA.

 

We are currently on a fixed rate which is due to expire at the end of August and when he first lost his job, we contacted BM and explained the situation to them. We asked a mortgage broker friend of ours for advice and offered them the following:

 

As the mortgage was due to go to variable at the end of August and due to current interest rates, our repayments would go down, would they be willing to take us off the fixed rate early and add the difference to the end of the mortgage. We would then pay them the variable rate which we could afford. They would have the difference on the end of the mortgage so they wouldn't be losing any money and we would maintain payments and not go into arrears - they refused point blank.

 

They actually weren't interested in discussing anything until we had actually missed a payment. As we couldn't meet the full amount, they agreed to take the reduced payment for 3 months but not to take us off the fixed rate early so we were building arrears. We are currently about £1500 in arrears. Also, they have refused to end the fixed rate in August if we are still in arrears so the amount will keep growing.

 

The JSA adviser suggested to my OH that we apply for the new government support for mortgage relief scheme which we did and were awarded. What they didn't tell us was that they would take my OH's JSA of £128.60 and pay it directly to BM, leaving us with 10p (yes, 10p!!) a week to live on- they even pay him 20p into our bank account every 2 weeks . We had worked out that with alot of scrimping and saving we could have continued paying the reduced amount we were paying to BM alongside the payment from the scheme and we would have cleared the arrears by the end of September. They would then have placed us on the lower rate and it would have all worked out - they'd have their money and we'd get to stay in our house.

 

Now, we can't afford to pay the extra, we are incurring arrears all the time. All the while there are arrears, they won't take us off the fixed rate so the arrears are going up and up. A very vicious circle!!!

 

Now, they've threatened us with repossession as they don't have any record of the telephone conversations we've had with them and they won't put anything in writing. All we have is the name of the different people we have spoken to. The young man I spoke to last week was rude in the extreme, demanding to know how I intended to pay off the arrears as there was no agreement in place. He did back down when I gave him the name of the person who had arranged it but was still very aggressive.

 

There just doesn't seem to be any way out here. If they do try to repossess us will a Judge look favourably on the fact that we've tried our hardest to keep paying them something every month?

 

We've had a mortgage continually since 1984 (with various lenders) and never, ever missed a payment. Surely that has to go in our favour some way along the line? We could happily meet the payments all the while my OH was working and even then would have managed to keep it going for a few months if we hadn't been stung (we've thought about going to the small claims court but been told it's not worth it because the firm has no money to pay anyone).

 

I'd be grateful to hear from anyone who has had dealings with BM Solutions - good or bad - or indeed anyone who can tell me what I should expect next.

 

Thanks for reading.