Yet More!

My father took out a SAM of the minimum set by Barclays of 15%; at the time (1998) the house was valued by Barclays at Ł100,000, therefore the minimum loan of Ł15,000. The SAM was due on the last death of either my father or mother, who fortunately is still going strong. Unfortunately my father died in November 2000, leaving me as the Executor of his estate. I contacted my local branch of Barclays where the mortgage was set up in May 2001 to be told that now all such transactions had been centralised ( nice local touch!!). If I paid for a valuation, Barclays would then let me know the settlement amount of the mortgage. I paid them Ł165 to value the house. The valuation came out to Ł127,000, an increase of over 10% per annum - not the norm for those days! I put it to Barclays that the original valuation might have been somewhat lower than the market trend and the new valuation somewhat over the market trend - guess what, they simply wrote and, to all intents and purposes, said "tough luck". There was no way in which my mother (73 at the time) and I could have afforded to repay that amount.

What the Barclay's "valued" price would be now & the repayment would be beyond belief.

Any thing that you achieve by your efforts can only be a benefit to those who have been ‘conned' by these financial behemoths over the past few years. Noticeably, it is not now possible to arrange a SAM through Barclays - I wonder why?