I’m starting my blog off with a rant about the kind of person that I’m sure a few of you out there will be able to identify with – Bank People.

This is my unofficial, generic term for people who have anything to do with banks and generally whose sole purpose for being on this planet is to try and rob you blind. I don’t, however, mean every poor sod who has ever worked in a bank, or the lower level employees who have little to do with how the upper echelons of bank society make the rules!

The featured tale for my whinge this week comes from the experiences a close friend of mine has been through recently, she didn’t really want the entire interweb knowing the gore-tastic details of her financial pickle but wanted me to vent her story under a pseudonym, so for all intents and purposes she can be called Matilda.

So our Matilda had a bit of a bad year, she had to take a pay cut at work due to unforeseen credit-crunch-related circumstances, the tenant in the house she bought a few years ago wasn’t paying his rent… He was self-employed, done himself a mischief at work, and therefore had no income for about 5 months. She didn’t want to throw him out, because, well I suppose it’s because she’s not a cold-hearted bitch, but she just couldn’t keep up on the mortgage repayments without his contribution.

So, that’s how she managed to fall into arrears of about 9 grand on her mortgage. I should also point out that Matilda is not really a fan of opening ‘boring-looking’ letters and doesn’t particularly like answering telephone calls from numbers that are not on her contacts list. These, well, let’s just call them character-traits, probably contributed to the reasons why she fell so far behind and was not really aware of it until it was almost too late.

When she did go through stockpile of boring letters, she knew she was in it deep! The mortgage company had put a repossession order on the property and set a court date for a few months time. It also turns out that her last two payments had gone astray…

What?? I hear you yell, how could two payments totaling nearly 3 grand, go astray? Well let me tell you first off, these payments were not disguised as the worn-out tennis ball that got lost under the couch in 1985 never to be seen again. Nor were they genetically modified to go by unnoticed in a KFC Bargain Bucket only to be eaten by some unassuming, but hungry guy. What had in fact happened was that the dipshit that took the money over the counter at the bank entered the roll number of the mortgage incorrectly.

You will be pleased to hear that these payments have since been recovered from the intergalactic bank-land black hole, and been put where they should have been put in the first bloody place!

I suppose she is slightly to blame for not keeping a keener eye on her already askew financial affairs, but needless to say, this pissed her off a wee bit. For if it hadn’t been for this mistake, the mortgage lender would have seen that she was making efforts to reduce the arrears and would probably not have issued the repossession order!

But what really got Matilda’s goat gruff, was the fact that those blaggards at the solicitors who the mortgage lender passed the case onto, kept piling stupid little charges onto her account.
Every time they write you a letter to tell you you’re elbow-deep in a poo-like substance, they decide to charge you for the pleasure of sending you a shitty piece of paper that any chump could have written. Then they charge you more for being in arrears so your debt gets even bigger. I suppose I understand why they do it, but the humanitarian in me wants to scream at them and be like – Jeez talk about kicking her repeatedly in her girl-goolies while she’s down!!

I’m probably too idealistic for my own damn good, but sometimes I wish they’d just have a heart. If they really must, why can’t they just make up some trumped up charges and stick them on the account of someone who has money. Leave us penniless paupers alone, we haven’t got enough to pay the damn thing as it is.

We hardly need to be paying some trainee solicitor £150 quid, to write a letter about as complicated as this, ‘Dear Poor Bastard, You are £—- in arrears, Please pay or be homeless. P.S we have charged you £150 quids for the pleasure of writing these 33 words to you. Have a Nice Day.’ Oh and we have also paid a poncy courier to hand-deliver this letter, and it was printed on the MOST expensive paper we could find, so now you owe us another £35’!!!

It’s just nonsensical to me. It is frustrating and unfair! But then, I suppose that’s life, and you’ve just got to learn the hard way that banks and mortgage lenders really weren’t put on this earth to do the little guy any favours!

PS with a little help from her parents and some hard saving, Matilda should be able to pay off the arrears in time to stop them foreclosing on her property and leave her sitting in the street, outside the house she used to own, with her Sports Direct rucksack, burning the stockpile of expensive letters to keep herself warm at night!