Your Problems

Your Problems

In 1992, we asked our Northern Bank adviser about saving £20 a month for each of our four children for their future education. He sold us a 20-year low-start endowment in my name. Premiums started at £40 a month in total, rising to £80 in 1997. We already had several life insurance policies each.

PM, Ballygawley

Low-cost endowments are designed to repay mortgages and have done a poor job at that. They are not suitable for flexible saving. You could get money out only if you died or after 20 years, by which time your children would be well educated; there is no leeway for making occasional withdrawals. Northern Bank still believes that the endowment was sold in your best interests because it provided life insurance, but it wrongly believed that your policies were all in your wife's name.

But it accepts that the risk associated with this endowment, which it calls minimal, was more than you wanted to take, so as a goodwill gesture it has agreed to pay you £4,075, which is the difference between the policy's current surrender value and what your money would be worth if it had gone into a savings account instead.

It's a hard life keeping up with Barclaycard

As a student I foolishly signed up for a Barclaycard. After reaching my £400 credit limit, I could afford only the minimum payment each month. Barclaycard Life Insurance then sold me life insurance and took.....continued below

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£6 a month after I had made the minimum payment. As a result, I was not meeting the minimum and was being charged. Eventually I paid £814, which I thought settled the account, but a year later the bank would not give me a graduate loan because of my poor credit rating. I found that two days after settling the account, Barclaycard had taken another £6, which has been outstanding all year.

AW, Southampton

Barclaycard says it gave you a bad credit record not because you failed to pay the final £6 but because you were six months in arrears by the time you paid up the account and then dropped £6 behind. You received only one statement showing the £6 debt because you were listed as being in arrears, so fell out of the regular monthly-statement process.

The bank has agreed to refund the £14.50 you spent on a fast Equifax credit report but I am concerned that, as a young student, you were sold life insurance at all. Barclaycard replied that 'the sales process was compliant with the regulations in place at the time' and you had not complained. You have now decided you will.

Cape crusade against Travelocity tickets

In January I paid £2,387 to Travelocity, the full cost of KLM flights to South Africa. In July, Travelocity emailed me about an alteration to the time of my connecting flight in Amsterdam, meaning I would miss the onward leg to Cape Town. It said I would be given a refund within 16 weeks, but I need the money immediately to book new flights. Travelocity offered no alternative and did not phone or write to confirm that I had seen the email.

TP, Canterbury