CALL US AT YOUR CONVENIENCE

A quarter of a century ago I bought my first home, a tiny little, one-bedroomed flat which was all I could afford at the time, given that salaries for newly acquired underlings were pitifully small and that monetary institutions were still being sensible enough to only lend borrowers amounts that they were probably able to afford to pay back. 

Such is my talent for property investment that, eight years later, I sold it at a 15% (or more) loss because, by that time, the housing market had crashed and, believe it or not, it is possible for a home to be worth less than you actually paid for it…

Actually, I've always believed that house prices were fairly abstract thing which are more dependant upon what someone is actually prepared to pay and which involve money the value of which is not "real" in any real sense of the word other than a means to an end because you have to live somewhere. If you totted up the cash value of the bricks and timber making up the average house, would than sum really move into the half millions…?

Still, that's probably a very different debate to what I had in mind for today, so let's move on before people get upset and start telling me what their house is "worth…"

Getting back to that tiny flat which I once called home, because I'm a perverse little sod, I kept up the monthly payments on the endowment policy which I had taken out to "cover" the mortgage, even though I no longer needed it. Now, against the better judgement of 20/20 hindsight, I took out an endowment mortgage because, well, that's what everyone advised you to do back in those days, and that's pretty much what everyone did.

However, when I moved, I moved into a rented room (and that sad tale has yet to be told, I think, in these particular pages…), and so, alongside a small legacy, the debt was paid off and the policy never claimed, being put instead towards the next mortgage which financed the purchase of the crumbling pile which I now call Blogfordshire Towers.

Anyway, to stretch a short story longer, after twenty-odd years of letters bearing legends like "WARNING: There is likely to be significant financial shortfall on your mortgage" thanks to the overpaid incompetences of various bankers, I switched my mortgage deal over to a repayment mortgage but, again being perverse about such things, still kept up the payments on the policy, viewing it as a small, if significant, bit of life insurance.

The point of all this is, however, that, twenty-five long years later, the policy is on the brink of maturing and I have recently received a letter informing me of this and wondering "whether I still had an interest in the policy…?"

You can bet your sweet bippy I do, matey!

Whilst I still expect that I would have more money today if I'd shoved all of those meagre payments into a mattress, I'll be damned if I'll let you hang on to it at use it as a downpayment on a new set of tyres for your youngest child's spare Porsche...

So, I had to ring them "at my convenience" although, despite this being a requested call with no other contact options being mentioned, it was still just the customer service number which meant that I still had to go through the automated process of being offered three utterly inappropriate options three times over, and furiously keep on having to dial "one for this, two for that" and so on for about ten minutes before a real person told me that they'd also written to my mortgage company asking them much the same thing.

A couple of days later and I had to ring them up too, and go through the "You will now be offered three options… Your call may be recorded for training purposes" procedure all over again, but at least we've now managed, as far as I understand it anyway, to accertain that, whatever this pittance turns out to be, it is, at least, going to be "Mine… All mine!!!" (Wha-ha-ha-ha-HAHHH!!!)

I don't yet know quite what it's going to be worth, although it will be significantly less than the riches I was led to believe it would lead to when I first signed the papers way back in 1989, it still might enable me to buy an extra loaf of bread or three. Honestly, I still believe that if I'd shoved it under the mattress I do genuinely believe it would probably have been worth more…

Meanwhile we had a bit of an altercation with another bank regarding my late mother's insurance policy which I'd failed to keep up the payments for after her accounts were frozen upon her death…

Strangely enough, given that we were advised that the relatives would in no way be expected to suffer financially under such circumstances, the bank seemed to think that we were somehow obliged to keep on paying them. They were, interestingly enough, the only one of the many companies and institutions which we have dealt with over this past few months who failed to understand the system of Probate and who were not prepared to wait for their money, which is ironic, really, given that they're part of the very same banking group which currently holds all of my mother's pitifully few frozen assets in their vaults.

There have been problems in issuing the Deed of Probate, but, in general, apart from this bunch of clowns, people are being very patient.

Still, at the risk of another hefty bill, I rang the solicitor who offered to ring them. Now, I've never had to instruct a solicitor to act on my behalf before, but it didn't half feel good to be able to do so.

At least...

Until, that is, I got the reply which, basically, added up to pretty much what we'd already managed to find out for ourselves anyway and suggested that we just pay it.

Sigh!

Anyway, in the end, I bit my lip and decided to just pay the wretched thing and picked up the phone and spent another ten minutes deciding which of the three options that I needed to choose, over and over again, before being fleeced of my own hard-earned cash by a git in a suit.

Well, I may be being unkind there… After all I can only assume he was wearing a suit.