Are you "ready to stake your claim for bank billions"? According to James Charles in The Sunday Times, the industry has set aside "huge sums" to cover mis-selling to customers and if you have been persuaded to buy a product that makes no sense for you over the last few years, some of it might just have been set aside for you. More than one million complaints came in last year about payment protection insurance (PPI).
At the peak of its popularity (with salesmen, if not customers), PPI was sold as an add-on to 43% of personal loans, despite the fact that huge numbers of people would never be able to claim it. Most people will have checked this already. But if you do have PPI and find you couldn't have claimed or were never told that its cost would be front loaded on to your loan with interest, go to Which.co.uk, download a template letter and complain. So far around 75% of complaints have been upheld.
You might also want to check whether you have been sold ID theft and card protection insurance recently, saysCharles. We've warned about this many times before the insurance tends to cost more than your liability can legally be. But the Financial Services Authority has said it has concerns about the way these insurances are sold.
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If you think you have been scare-mongered into buying them, write and ask for a refund. The same goes for the new trend for packaged current accounts. Hordes of people have been bamboozled into buying these for their "extra benefits". But they are often of no use or simply doubles of insurances customers already have. Again, write and ask for a refund.
Once you have done all that, make a mental note never to buy a financial product again without researching it. The odd hundred pounds here or there is one thing, but there are new products and scams popping up for the unwary all the time. A particularly nasty one was highlighted by Paul Lewis on the BBC earlier this week: the "pension liberation"scheme.
Under these, unauthorised firms promise to help you get money out of your pension early. You transfer your money from your pension to one set up by them. They lend you half the value, take a whopping fee (20% or so) and then "invest" the rest (you probably won't see this bit again).
If you are desperate for cash you might think this worth it. But it isn't.
When HMRC finds out, they will tax you at 40% (the standard rate for an unauthorised withdrawal from a pension fund), plus another 15% if you have taken more than 25% of the value of the fund. The result? You end up with almost nothing. Now that's real mis-selling.by Merryn Somerset Webb
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