Fruitless Endeavours

Within the Dialogues of Phaedrus, ancient Greek writer Plato once said, “Things are not always as they seem; the first appearance deceives many” and as I look back on yet another year of battling with the banks there appears to have been little to encourage me to believe my best endeavors have achieved anything of note.

Determined to remain informed on all things bankster while simultaneously fighting HBOS and LLoyds has been taxing enough without running a household of lodgers, cooking and cleaning for a family of five, twice weekly visiting two elderly relatives, Chairing the Friends and organizing upwards of half a dozen events at my children’s school.  Nevertheless, increasingly self  critical of both the content and the way in which I write my blog, each post has received unsparing hours of scrutiny before it has been released into the public domain in the vain hope that it will, in some small way, make a difference.

This year alone I have ,

• Added a further thirty nine pieces to my blog roll only to acquire very few additional members as a result.

• Signed up to follow 331 people via twitter, sent 1298 tweets only to find a mere handful wish to follow me in return

• Sent numerous letters to the Financial Ombusman Service only to have my original Halifax Bank of Scotland complaint thrown out on grounds of jurisdiction 
• Had my Lloyds complaint, concerning fictitious payment arrangements, denied by an FOS adjudicator.

However despite former indications to the contrary, in some areas, I have also enjoyed some very welcome results.

Much to my delight and amazement I have,

• Quadrupled the number of page views I regularly receive on my blog posts and now have in excess of 1500 a month

• Exceeded 80 followers on twitter all of whom have discovered my blog themselves and chosen to follow me

• Not only received £500 from the FOS's for their miss handling my case, but also received an offer of settlement via the FOS in respect of my LLoyds Banking Group ficticious payment complaint. As well as upholding my claim and awarding me a further £25.00 their investigative reports states they find Lloyds behaviour completely without "empathy or understanding for our circumstances".

In addition,

• I have also received both a phone call and an email from someone within Lloyds Banking Group who, profusely apologetic, assures me he has not only taken ownership of my HBOS over valuation complaint but, in the light of its miss handling over the last twenty months, plans to both investigate and "deal with my concerns" swiftly.

Plato also says, “Everyone ought to bear patiently the results of his own conduct” and finally, after four long years of waiting without patience, the results of my own conduct appear, if I am not deceived, about to bear fruit.

Here's hoping it is not another sizable helping of prickly pears!

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

Plato and Platitudes

Plato once said, “Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws” and, to my intense irritation, this morning’s endeavours at my lawyers office were no exception to this disheartening observation. Once again it has been revealed there are yet more HBOS favouring obstacles in my path to prevent the law from making HBOS accountable for actions which now appear to have been pivotal to our overall financial demise as well as the loss of our home.

When, in October 2008, I first discovered to what lengths my husband had over extended to keep our property development company afloat, my focus was on debt forgiveness for the £217,000 mortgage shortfall HBOS chose to create when they forced a sale on home. Initially unaware of HBOS’s sexist and neglectful attitude towards their duty of care to customers, it did not occur to me that this infamous bank had actually played, through its corporate growth at any cost policy, a leading role in our financial downfall. 

I now strongly suspect the opposite and plan to do my level best to prove it.

Hearing of a banking policy to over value properties for mortgage purposes in the USA and then discovering HBOS themselves had launched a pre-crisis mortgage product offering 125% loan to value (in Nov 2006) prompted me to consider the possibility that our home might have been overvalued too. I now believe HBOS' objective in April 2006 was not to raise us money against the equity within our property but instead it was to sell us a £790,000 mortgage against equity we simply did not have. My theory is further supported by the fact that our only prospective purchaser's surveyor down valued our home (by a massive £150,000) to £800,000 in April 2008 after HBOS had valued it a whopping £925,000 less than two years earlier. When HBOS eventually sold our home in April 2009 for a mere £665,000, I began to smell a very large HBOS rat.

Aghast at the implications it became clear to me that the attempts to sell our house between April 2007 and September 2008 had been completely futile and, for the first time, I began to comprehend just how much the HBOS culture of making a sale at any price had actually cost us. Not only had it, from outset, made it impossible to sell our home without creating a shortfall for years to come, but it also misled us into thinking there was enough equity within our main residence (15% of its value) to complete our building development project from the proceeds of its sale. What is more, this building project was not only destined to provide both a new home for our family but also was also designed to provide a generous residual income from its two letting units. In addition it was also earmarked to provide the security for a further building project on which my husband had already spent £50,000 obtaining an option and planning permission for the construction of twenty-three Eco friendly homes, all of which a housing association had already agreed to purchase off plan. This project alone was estimated to return us in excess of £500,000 profit.  

Because of an inaccurate HBOS valuation in April 2006 I now realise my life was, and always has been, on a crash course for financial destruction from the day we accepted HBOS’s re-mortgage offer.  Furthermore, I am nothing short of devastated to find, if the two litigation lawyers I consulted this morning are to be believed, there is nothing the law can do to make HBOS accountable for the impact these huge losses have had on my future let alone encourage them to write off a £217,000 mortgage shortfall they created when they refused to allow me to meet out interest payment by letting my property while my husband found another job.

In the words of Martin Luther King, “Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal” and it appears that from what I have learnt today, our feral bankers are not only set to enjoy an untouchable status when it comes to regulation and reform but are also set to continue, like Hitler, to profit from the benefit of a legal carte blanche as well.