Outstanding accounts

As my husband arrived home earlier than unexpected today he found me sitting with a friend in our cosy farmhouse kitchen.  Being a very blustery day, we had chosen warm tea and M&S waste sale chocolate for our refreshment while injured seals were the topic of conversation. This comforting scene was achieved by exercising a well practiced mental manoeuvre which took me swiftly from debt fighting machine to comely housewife and mother in the blink of an eye and, by adopting this facade, I have managed to maintain the divide between our unpalatable past and our family’s future. 

My friend, equally chameleon like in her abilities, played her role of tea drinking companion to perfection as she packed away her computer while chatting about current affairs with my husband.  After a few minutes of pleasantries, she discreetly gathered up the post of the day and made her exit.  She, like my husband, understands the rules only too well.  The financial monster in the cupboard has been strictly out of bounds for him since October 2008.

The letters dispatched today are as consequence of my email being featured on BBC Radio 2.  Host Jeremy Vine was discussing debt related mental health issues with Martin Lewis who gasped when he heard my story.  The task in hand has been to attempt to contact Martin Lewis for help.

One of the many points which were made was even a relatively strong, financially aware person, such as myself, is unable to make suitable and informed decisions while suffering from stress.  The organisations whose livelihoods depend on the collection of debt, trade on this knowledge.  It is little wonder many people, including my husband, are driven to consider suicide because of the debt collecting companies campaigns of unrelenting harassment. In 2008 we were receiving upwards of thirty phone calls a day starting at 8.00am and finishing at 9.00pm. I always answered every one.

For six months my friend watched me attempt to deal with our insurmountable financial problems until April 2009, when, I finally agreed to accept her help.  By this time I had lost 35lbs and every hair on my body.

Today and every day since, my friend has freely given her time to fight my cause. We call it the “Crap Clinic” and we meet regularly to engage in the “Battle of the Banks”.  Because of her determined resolve at a time when I was emotionally on my knees, my £1,000,000 horror story has been reduced to a mere £350,000 nightmare.  Thankfully, she has agreed to see it through with me to the very end.  Without her selfless devotion, I would have undoubtedly collapsed under the pressure.

How can I ever repay her?

Postal Panic

Former stand up comedian, youth counsellor and advocate of social emotional learning Michael Pritchard once said, "Fear is that little darkroom where negatives are developed" and as a result of my ongoing experiences at the hands of the banks, my fear is now fully developed into an all encompassing and completely involuntary negative reaction whenever I catch sight of our postman.

Frequently terrified to the core at a mere glimpse of a Royal Mail van outside my house, the feeling of utter defenselessness has been further heightened now I have been advised by the Citizen’s Advice Bureau that their debt counselling budget for my case has been exhausted. Despite the fact that I rarely receive any correspondence I am unable to deal with these days, I seem to be incapable of allowing logic to suppress my panic. This is the price I am paying for attempting to deal direct with the banks following a financial demise which left my family without an income and homeless, and my husband with forty four defaulted credit cards, four defaulted mortgages and a substantial number of the irate tradesmen.

Initially, my daily mission was to speak or write in response to every letter received in the belief that taking action would be the antidote to the all consuming terror I felt at our hopeless financial position. Needless to say I got nowhere. At best the collections departments were sympathetic but all insisted they had no means of communicating with the decision makers within their own organisations and as a result their hands were tied. The postal persecution continued. Forty letters a day advised me I had ignored all previous attempts to communicate, bailiffs would be calling to assess my assets and doorstep collection agents were imminent. The notification of court cases pending were too numerous to even warrant separate files. Despite constantly communicating with each and every one of them the heartless harassment continues and repeatedly trying to resolve the seemingly unresolvable cost me my hair and my health.

Today, thankfully, my postman brought only good news yet the short term relief from a single day of respite remains blighted by the knowledge that tomorrow my fears of further threats will probably be justified. Persecution by post has consumed my life, my health and my marriage and now, in addition to living with the horrors of a million pounds of unresolvable debt I also fear, if the banks continue to have their way, postal panic is not a condition I will ever be allowed to recover from.

I hope and pray I am wrong.

Health wealth and happiness

I read recently "the true measure of a man is what he would do if he would never be caught” and having always operated with a totally different moral outlook myself, I struggle to comprehend a life code of this kind.  For me it has always been about whether or not a proposed action is beneficial for all those concerned and, for the last thirty three years, every one of my decisions has, by necessity, taken into account the impact it would have on my children.

In the early days, within the first few months of the Grand Opening, I was desperate to understand the motivating values on which my husband based the decisions which ultimately led to our family to its complete financial demise.   It was a chance meeting which gave me the first tiny insightful fragment into what may have happened to my husband’s decision making processes.

According to my source there are two completely separate elements to making every decision, namely the cerebral and the emotional. The emotional component works out the impact of a proposed actions success or failure while the cerebral component does the calculations necessary for its implementation and measures the chance of  its success. I am told neither process should rule the other but instead they should work in partnership to give a balance of risk verses return for every decision. 

It is clear to me  my husband’s withdrawal following the grief he suffered on diagnosis of his aunt, his mother and his brother from Motor Neurone disease, followed by their sad, painful and terrifying deaths only weeks apart, promoted an emotional shut down which had a catastrophic affect on my husband’s business acumen. However, whilst I can explain and understand these circumstances in a single, heart- broken man, I cannot for the life of me understand the logic of an almost identical decision making process which appears to have guided HBOS bankers down a similar path of ditruction. Surely when it comes to an corporate strategy, the chances of making responsible business decisions are improved by the numbers of those involved in rolling out these commercial initiatives. That is, of course, unless the banking industry has been brought to its knees by what the men at the top were prepared to do believing they would not be caught.

While  I can see irresponsible lending along with banking executive greed has undoubtedly brought our financial industry to its knees, sadly it is not the culprits of this crime who are destined to suffer the cost. Instead, it is my family’s health, wealth and happiness which appears to be the price they are only to happy to pay. French mathematician Blaise Pascal once said," Justice and power must be brought together so that whatever is powerful is just and whatever is just is powerful."

I live in hope.

It's a mad, mad world

Along with the other Mum’s of the year five children at my son’s prep school, I am nearing the completion of their longitudinal study.  I am expecting to do quite well, in a nine year old boy sort way, but can’t for the life on me understand why, each year, the unwritten school law dictates this project should be produced. If the Mum’s are hard at work producing it then surely it is beyond the ability of the vast majority of the pupils for whom it is set.

 There is however, a bi-product.  The expectation for me to turn a small boy’s efforts into something the school can be proud of has allowed me to become an expert on Lord Kelvin the mathematician and physicist.  When, during my research, I discovered Lord Kelvin said “you can understand perfectly if you give your mind to it,” I found myself sighing in exasperation at my endless, and so far fruitless, attempts to have a meaningful dialogue with Lloyds TSB and HBOS.

Further frustrated at more examples of Lloyds TSB’s mindless and misguided actions when I read journalist and BBC reporter Ian Fraser’s recent blog I can't but be incredulous to discover Antonio Horta-Osorio is being rewarded with a “golden hello” in excess £13,000,000 in recognition of the difficulties he is to face in his new job as trouble shooter extraordinaire. Having written to Antonio Horta-Osorio twice recently I do not rate his chances at living up to the board of Lloyds TSB’s expectations if my experiences are anything to go by. My first letter to him was as Chief Executive of Santander. I wrote in an effort to solicit some support and compassion following an Abbey National campaign of bombardment due to our credit card default.

 On the second occasion I wrote to him in his role as Chief Executive of Lloyds TSB.  In this letter I asked him to intervene with HBOS. They have, over the course of two years, been harassing and bullying me in an effort to collect on a debt they know to be unrecoverable and which still hold they created.   In both cases I did not receive a reply and although I concede I am but a small fish, it does not bode well if organisations cannot communicate with their customers and  instead continue to waste share holders money chasing unrecoverable debt.  If this is too change I, like Ian Fraser, cannot see how paying Executives lavish rewards at any time, let alone in a recession,  can do anything other than massage their egos to the point of deity status.  To pay them obscene amounts before they have achieved any of the anticipated results seems nothing short of ludicrous. 

Lord Kelvin also said, “When you are faced with a difficulty, you are up against a discovery” and after the past two years of extreme financial and emotional hardship I can only agree  I have discovered after much personal difficult with both HBOS bankers and my son's longitudinal study,  the madness is clearly set to continue in both the banking world and at my son’s prep school.

Heritable Heroes

As I sit writing in the comfortable warmth of my kitchen while listening to a Beatles CD, I have one eye on my twelve year old daughter who is dancing with gleeful abandon while singing along enthusiastically.  Always delighted to see evidence of how untouched my children are by our ongoing financial traumas, I find myself further smiling at the start of Paperback Writer as I am reminded of a recent conversation with my business mortgage manager in which his words of encouragement were, on this occasion, about my writing abilities.

Aware of the saying that kindness can never be wasted, I had never ever envisaged I would be using a bank as an example of the extent of this human kindness. After all, I like so many others within the financial services industry believed it common knowledge a bank has no heart. However, having used the past forty one blogging opportunities to slate the majority of the banking community, I thought it timely to share the experience I have had at the hands of my business bank Heritable who have, in all their dealings with me, been all heart.

After the “Grand Opening” on 1 October 2008 I was forced by circumstance, over the space of little more than an hour, to redefine my role as contented middle class, stay-at-home housewife and mother, to become not only a "One a Woman Debt fighting machine", but a management consultant for a deficit of a million pounds and a "Bank Battler" extraordinaire. My sixty minutes of letter opening had revealed that, as well as a large house with more than two hundred thousand pounds of negative equity and four hundred and forty six thousand pounds of credit card debt, our property development company, which enjoyed limited liability negated by directors guarantees, had two half built assets of dubious value. Unbeknown to me and at the very same as I was licking my wounds on the discovery of my own impossible financial situation in the comfort of my soon to be repossessed sixteenth century home, our business bankers Heritable, were doing precisely the same thing in their London offices with the help of their Administrators.

Now, nearly two and a half years on, and in complete contrast to the actions of the Bank of Scotland, Heritable Bank have done everything within their power to help me make something of our company’s business assets. Sadly, the flaunting of planning regulations on my husband’s part  combined with a recession fuelled fall in property prices dictated circumstances were against us from the outset. In spite of both my and the banks combined efforts, our company, and by default my husband and I, have been left with yet another substantial debt. Two hundred and nine thousand pounds remains outstanding after the disposal of our business properties and this time it is Heritable Bank holding the ticket and not, as is the case with the forced sale on our main residence, HBOS .

Now the "assets of dubious value” have been sold, Heritable Bank, have elected to implement a pragmatic solution to our shortfall. Without prompting I was contacted and advised it is their intention to write off this debt on compassionate grounds and in so doing, Heritable have allowed me to preserve my dignity, in all my dealings with them, right through to the very end. In complete contrast HBOS, have seen fit to defend their right to hound me mercilessly from outset for a £217,000 shortfall their actions created and, but for the automatic amnesty status of any compliant under investigation by the Financial Ombudsman's Service's investigation, I have little doubt HBOS would be continuing to persecute me with monotonous regularity to date.

Quaker missionary Stephan Grellet once said, "I expect to pass through this world only once, therefore any good thing I can do, any kindness that I can show to any fellow creature, let me do it now: let me not defer or neglect it for I shall not pass this way again." I have experienced nothing but kindness and compassion at the hands of Heritable Bank and I know, in my heart of hearts, the reason for this comes down to just one man. I believe it was he who elected, unlike HBOS, to take a leaf out of Grellet's book and act with compassion, empathy and understanding throughout.

For this simple act of kindness and for continuing to follow and encourage my blog, he is most definitely my Heritable Hero.

Childish things

Today my husband said there is nothing better than watching things grow in our garden and holding me in his arms. However, in truth there is in another love he holds even dearer and thankfully it is a love we both unreservedly share. 

The love for our children.

An all consuming determination to keep my family together throughout the trials and tribulations of our financial circumstances has been driven by the belief that it is what is best for my children and the sense of responsibility I feel for them has provided me with the resolve to continue battling with the Bank of Scotland and Lloyds TSB for an unencumbered future for us all.

Thankfully no longer racked with grief for the life we had it did not take to feel the impact of our circumstances. Life without money is a life with less choice but equally I have a great deal to be thankful of. For example, I remain indebted to our landlords for the compassion and understanding they showed when they offered us our tenancy without references, reduced the rent to something we could afford and allowed us to take a lodger to make ends meet.   However, this benevolence comes at a price.  Inadequate heating, leaky windows and pipes go unchecked and without money I have no choice but to stay put.

A similar situation exists when it comes to my children’s prep school.  I am truly grateful to the Headmaster for the bursaries we now have for our children but if there are any issues, I know I will be paralysed out of gratitude for his generosity.  

My nine year old son is a loving child with an inquiring mind, an open smile and a kind, polite disposition. He is rarely naughty and is generally very keen to please. He has grown up in the shadow of two older siblings both of which are exceptionally able academically while sadly my youngest son is dyslexic and often really struggles in the classroom. To my great relief the staff at his independent school have been working very hard on building his confidence by using every opportunity to praise both his creative abilities and his sporting prowess and because of this after years of limited confidence, he is now beginning to show signs of some self belief. 

However, yesterday this was far from the case.

Distraught at being told by his teacher she was ashamed of him for not producing the standard of work she anticipated, I find my son, once again, convinced he is the most "stupidest person in our family". While I, impoverished and powerless thanks to a financial position HBOS have done their best to compound, I remain hindered from coming to my son's defense out of gratitude for his private education without charge. 

Money is most definitely not everything, it does buy choice and I have discovered to my extreme frustration, accepting the benevolence of others can uncomfortable impair the voice.

Today, my heart bleeds for my son.

Viva Espana

They say life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans and today I wholeheartedly subscribe to this observation.  In the space of hour I have visited my eighty four year old Mum, called in on a friend for a coffee, told my lodger Daryl not to leave rotting stinking food in our fridge, advised the Chairman of the school Governors their marketing strategy is flawed, praised the Friends secretary for all the hard work she is doing on the up and coming summer ball, explored how best to prepare for a court case against the Bank of Scotland with my solicitor, and discussed the legal implications with our tenant in Spain in the event of the imminent repossession of our apartment.

In reality any one of these subjects would be more than enough for my addled brain but knowing full well success usually comes to those who are too busy to go looking for it, I always feel compelled to do everything I have agreed to. The job I had planned for today was simply to establish what Banca Caja in Spain want to do with our apartment on the Costa Del Sol. We haven't been there for three years and have made no payments for most of this time to either Banca Caja, who hold the mortgage, or the community who provide the maintenance services for the complex. Bizarrely enough, it was only when some good friends found a long term tenant for me who expressed a interest in buying it, the real trouble started.

Discovering the rent being offered was enough to pay all the interest on the mortgage with Banca Caja as well as 95% of the Community fees, I foolishly thought those concerned would be pleased if I arranged for my tenant to pay these amounts direct to both of them. It was at this point the madness began. On moving in, my tenant, who enjoyed watching the BBC channels on TV was disappointed to find that the Community satellite was failing to provide them. He approached the community manager about a repair but was told it would not be forth coming without a committee vote. This was because our financial difficulties had resulted in 9000 euros of arrears.

At the committee meeting the Chairman of the Community recommended a vote to a force sale of the apartment on the pretext that the equity from this be used to recoup the amount owing. No amount of explaining on my part that the property had 100,000 euros of negative equity would deter him. I later discovered, his motive had less to do with settling an outstanding community account and a lot to do with acquiring our apartment cheap for his friend.

 My tenant, who by this time was feeling very insecure, suggested I write to my bank and my solicitor to verify his position.  I did this only to hear that the bank also wished to take possession of the apartment too but had not done so because they had forgotten to impliment it two years previously. I was assured that my tenant could remain in residence due to his protected tenancy and he would be allowed to purchase the apartment within a five year period. Banca Caja went on to say that they would, in exchange for my agreement to this, write off the 100,000 euros negative equity and arrears and settle all outstanding bills against the property including the Community fees.

Hallelujah, I thought.

Everyone is happy (except perhaps the Chairman of the Community’s bargain hunting friend) and no stupid “Bank of Scotland type” debt collecting persecution tactics for me to deal with either.
The icing on the cake was that, during the following weeks, Banca Caja stopped allocating the rent payments to my mortgage account. When I enquired why, they insisted that it was no longer necessary as any interest due when the repossession was implemented would form part of the write off. My tenant, whose solicitor advised him he had to pay rent to someone to protect his tenancy rights, has continued to pay it to me and I have now purchased a modest holiday with the proceeds.
Thanks Banca Caja you have been great but do you realise, I wonder, that you have still not repossessed my apartment.

I am now wondering if maybe you have forgotten again.