Payment Protection Insurance (PPI)

If you have borrowed money on a loan, credit card or mortgage – you may have been sold or been forced to take out something that is called Payment Protection Insurance (PPI).  You may be owed thousands of pounds in compensation.  Payment Protection Insurance is designed to protect the borrowers’ ability to maintain their repayments in the event that they get sick, or unable to work through an accident or unemployment. 

Payment protection Policies are available to protect most forms of personal credit, including mortgages personal loans and credit cards.  Most mis-sold payment protection policies are sold at the same time as the credit is taken out.  The opportunity to shop around for a good price or the fact that the salesman may pressure you in to taking out PPI is very high.  Salesmen are on good bonuses for selling PPI, with the sales targets being under the microscope for managers as the profitability is so high.

Of course insurance can prove invaluable – the problem for people whom purchase PPI is that the policy can offer little or no benefit.  The exclusions lists and payment schedules are designed for maximum profits for the banks.  Although this information should be gleaned from you ‘the customer/insured’ the lenders glide over this element and make the sale regardless.  When you come to make a claim, the insurance usually doesn’t cover your needs. 

With employment, the insurance usually pays out on the 60th day of unemployment – the problem is, the same banks and lenders still want their mortgage payments on the 1st of the month.  Quite frankly, PPI is a bad purchase.  Most people are sold PPI and they don’t even want or understand what they are buying at the point of sale.

Like hundreds of thousands (potentially millions) of others, you may have indeed been the victim of bad advice and mis-selling.  Were the exclusions and costs made clear?  Were you made aware that taking out PPI is not necessary, or were you a victim of the classic salesman’s line ”Unfortunately, if you do not take PPI you will not be accepted for the loan”.

If you have cancelled or repaid your loans early, you may have had a shock.  You may have repaid more than you borrowed, although you had made many repayments towards your debt.  This is because you paid upfront for the insurance.  You don’t take out 5 years car insurance deals do you?  The reason being you like to change cars or you may have a better price the following year from another provider.  The same can be said for borrowing money.  You may have had a ‘teaser rate’ of 4.5% APR - it wasn’t made clear that you loan would then rocket to 12.5% APR.  Repayments become unaffordable and you re-do your loan – PPI is kept as it was an upfront fee and you end up borrowing more money to repay the PPI plus early redemption charges and capital. 

The more you borrow the more you get in to debt!  The sale of this PPI is disgraceful and hopefully will be stamped out when the Competition Commission finally report and remedy on the PPI market.
The good news is  - we are here to help.  If you have been a victim of PPI mis-selling, then contact us immediately.  We can help you recover your money in as little as 8 weeks.  We have recovered £millions in compensation for our clients and we continue to do so daily. 

With 25000 clients growing daily, you can be assured of a great service.  You can call us at any time for updates and information from a competent business.  Good advice goes a long way.  You do not pay upfront for any work carried out by us.  Be very careful of fee charging companies!  We can help you if your case is not subjected to the Financial Ombudsman Service as our legal teams can start legal proceedings against the lenders for mis-representation (mis-selling). 

Can you make a claim?

The Financial Services Authority (FSA) published strict rules for the sale of Payment Protection Insurance, which the advisor must follow.  The reasons they did this is because the advisors didn’t follow any rules previously (we have letters admitting so – which always goes down well in Court!) – The only rules that were followed came from their manager for “How much have we made from PPI today then?”

To help you understand whether or not you have a claim, here are a few of the reasons why you may have received bad advice – we are not joking when we list these reasons.  You may read them and think ‘that’s what I was led to believe’- 

• You were told you must have PPI in order to get the loan
• You were pressured into accepting the PPI even though you never wanted it
• You were told you had more chance of being accepted for the loan with PPI
• The small print was not explained fully – especially exclusions for existing medical conditions and self employment
• The full costs of the PPI were not explained properly
• You were not told PPI was included in the loan – you didn’t even know you had it