If you are one of the thousands of people in the UK who took out a loan, mortgage, car loan or a credit card, there was a chance you were mis-sold Payment Protection Insurance (PPI) along with it and you may be eligible to file for a PPI claim.
Initially, PPI is a good product, intended to cover debt repayments in case that you fell ill and you’re unable to work but a lot of policies were mis-sold along with those financial products.
You can file a claim if you were sold PPI without being fully informed, without you being told it was optional or you were not even qualified to benefit the policy due to existing medical conditions at the time you took out the policy that could also hinder you from working in the future.
There is also a good chance that your PPI claim can be successful, if these also apply to you:
- You were unemployed, self-employed or retired when you took out the loan
- You were older than the age limit of your policy
- You were told that it was mandatory along with your loan
- You weren’t told how to cancel your policy
- You didn’t have consent when it was added or you didn’t realize it was there and it wasn’t made obvious to you
You can also check on your credit report, credit card statements or loan documents to see if you have any additional payments of PPI. Once you have determined that you were mis-sold, you can then file your PPI claims. Here are several steps you can take to ensure that your claim will be successful:
1. Check the paperwork whether you have PPI applied to your loan. Contact the companies back when you don’t have the statements and ask the paperwork directly from them. The company who sold you the PPI should be your first point of contact.
2. There is no limit on how far back you can go and have a PPI claim. This can be a little bit of a challenge if you don’t have paperwork and you request from the financial institution – they are not required to keep records that are over six years old but there are successful PPI claims that even go as far as the 90s.
3. You can still file for a claim even if your lender has gone out of business or it was merged with another company. If this is your case, then you would have to contact the Financial Service Compensation Scheme (FSCS) for more information on what steps you will need to do.
4. Complain to your lender and provide as much information as you can to prove that the policy was mis-sold to you. Most of the time, the provider will pay your claim without challenging it but if they disagree with your claim and they are adamant that the PPI was sold fairly to you, you are entitled to go back to them and request that they prove that to you.
5. Lenders are supposed to respond within eight weeks time. If they haven’t resolved your complaint or if you’re not happy with the company’s response, you can contact the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) and file a complaint there. Keep in mind though that with the volume of complaints, it may take some time for them to get back to you, even taking over a year for a decision to be made.
Do you feel that this is too much work for you? A lot of people also go through a claims management company that can take care of all these on their behalf. It is worth checking out if you do have a mis-sold PPI as you can get back several thousand pounds back on your PPI claim. Get started now – there is no deadline yet but with the way things are going, a deadline could soon be implemented.
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