Naked cashiers! (Abbey National in general)

Member Name: Lady1981

Product:	Abbey National in general
Date:	08/11/09 (49 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: They have reeled me in with a new rate

Disadvantages: They are generally useless

Ok, so the cashiers arent really naked but it got your attention! ;-)

I have never had an account with Abbey, only my mortgage which I took out approximately a year and eight months ago. I was remortgaging my flat and the process was easy and swift. I was working as a conveyancer at the time though, so I guess this helped as I knew approximate timescales etc and didn't concern myself when I didn't receive my mortgage until 2 weeks after my valuation was carried out.

The problems began when the mortgage was underway.

My other half and I try to overpay our mortgage as much as we can, always explaining carefully to Abbey that we want our monthly payments to remain the same and for our term to be reduced so that the mortgage of paid off that bit quicker.

Without fail, Abbey have messed up the paperwork involved with the overpayments. Most times our monthly payment is reduced even though we ask for only the term to be reduced. And when I say we ask, we write a letter explaining, speak to them on the phone and tell the cashier in the branch.

One time we received a letter telling us that our future monthly payments would be £0.00. I had to call them and explain to them that if we actually paid £0.00 as set out in their letter, it is likely we would eventually be reposessed! ;-)

Now comes the tricky part. After telling Abbey several times that I will not be going with them when we come to remortgage in March 2010, they have now written to us and told us we can go onto a fixed rate which is nearly 2% less than what we are paying now.

We can go onto the new rate straight away, it only takes a phonecall and the only fee we will have to pay will be £125 as opposed to the usual 1K or so to move to other lenders.

Having worked out how much we would pay over 2 years for the other top fixed rates which are around at the moment, i am begrudgingly convinced that we need to change our deal to the new Abbey one now.

Although Abbey have been totally useless, after several phone calls we do eventually get them to sort things out for us. I have stopped getting stressed about them being rubbish and just explain to them calmly where they have gone wrong and what they need to do to rectify matters.

This is because unftortunately, I have found that a lot of the people who work in the call centres are quite young and have not had a mortgage, do not have any interest in mortgages and have not been trained well enough so that they properly understand them.

Having said all that, we are in a credit crunch and I am watching the pennies. The saved pennies, nay pounds, I'm afraid to say, are taking priority over customer service at the moment. I would like to be able to say I'm taking my business elsewhere but I think that's called cutting off my nose to spite my face!

Summary: the bottom line is they still work out cheapest for me