I’m worth £600 an hour My time became worth £597.84 per hour this week when I challenged the price that my home insurer was planning to charge for my contents and buildings insurance. The policy is due for renewal at the end of August. It would be renewed automatically (auto renewal). It’s not a bad thing to set up, just in case, say, you were away on holiday and forgot to get the policy renewed before departing, or had a family emergency and were distracted. Auto renewal means you are never without cover. Don’t wait for your insurer But you […]
Tag: complaining
Insurance quotes – making a crisis out of a crisis
It was an insurance company that coined the slogan ” We won’t make a drama out of a crisis”, and now the insurance companies seem determined to make the most out of a crisis. Everyone knows that several thousand homes were flooded over Christmas and the New Year period and that in the end it will be us, as household insurance customers, who will end up paying the bill. Just how quick the insurers have got round to making us pay has amazed even us. One money fighter who last week queried why her household insurance had increased from £274 […]
So you want to make complaints about financial services? Yeah, right.
Financial services companies are still not dealing with customer complaints properly. Just look at the figures for complaints about financial services. The majority of those brought to the Financial Ombudsman decided in favour of the customer in the second half of 2013. Okay, so banks have allocated more than £20 billion to compensate the victims for the outrageous mis-selling of payment protection insurance, but customers are still having to exhaust the banks’ own complaints procedure before they can take their complaints to the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS). Talk about making us jump through hoops! Financial services complaints Over the full […]
The great big pensions rip off
We save in a pension fund for years and get a lousy deal on charges and investment performance and then we get to retirement age and get ripped off again. The Financial Conduct Authority has just caught up with one of the scams, which leaves up to 80% of pension savers worse off than they ought to be. The practice currently under scrutiny is the annuity market. When people come to pension age they are offered an annuity – a guaranteed pension for life based on the lump sum they have saved. Currently a 65 year old can expect to […]
How to complain by phone – watch the video
My weapon of choice has always been the phone. I can write a sharply worded email or letter, but give me a phone and I’m ready to do battle – whatever the nature of my complaint. After years of bending big business ears to my will I’m ready to pass on a few tips about how to complain by phone successfully… […]
Complaints about packaged bank accounts double – have you got one?
Yet another report shows how careful we have to be when visiting our bank branch. The latest statistics from the Financial Ombudsman reveal that large numbers of bank customers are complaining that they have been mis-sold expensive packaged bank accounts. These are the sorts of accounts that come with all sorts of bells and whistles on them, such as travel insurance, all fine and dandy if you need everything you get but otherwise an expensive way to bank. Complaints have more than doubled on 2012-13 and some bank customers were unaware that they had “bought” a packaged account. The most […]