Missed Mortgage Payments

When you have missed mortgage payments or missed secured loan payments, you will receive letters from the lender as you are in breach of the contract. The initial contact will assume there was a genuine reason and will involve merely a reminder and perhaps a new direct debit mandate should your bank details have changed.

• Firstly, they have to write to satisfy guidelines set out by the Council of Mortgage Lenders and overseen by the Financial Services Authority. These procedures are designed to protect you in the event of unusual circumstances, such as long-term illness, redundancy, divorce, etc... and also the mortgage lender in the event of a missed mortgage payments.

• Secondly, you may not be aware that you have missed mortgage payments in the first place for several reasons - perhaps the bank has refused to pay for some reason. There are quite a few instances where there are marital issues where perhaps one partner has deliberately missed mortgage payments.

These letters are generally automatically generated and very impersonal and as such you should not take offence at the content as it is likely when you phone the person at the other end will not know all the relevant facts.

If you do not respond to these letters they will not go away as the lender will assume you are ignoring them - please remember all correspondence will be recorded by the lender and they will use this against you in the court to show that they have done everything they need to help you.

If you miss payments on a secured loan this may be more serious. There is a myth that a second charge company cannot repossess - this is not true. Simply consider the higher risk involved on lending on a smaller amount of equity and if they did repossess, the mortgage company would get their money first. With the remainder of the equity, this would have to pay for all other costs involved, such as solicitors etc. All of a sudden you have a smaller amount of money to pay the secured loan company which is why, in our experience, they tend to act faster than a normal mortgage company.