When things go wrong

A couple from Dublin fell into arrears two years into the term of their mortgage when the husband suffered serious, near-fatal injuries as a result of a road collision caused by an uninsured driver.

He was unable to return to work for a period.

"They say you should never bury your head in the sand, so we wrote to them and explained the circumstances and we never stopped paying - but obviously not the full amount, because we simply didn't have the means," says Ann (not her real name).

Several months later, the couple, who were expecting their second child, were called into the head office of their lender - one of the largest in the State. Their young child was with them.

"The first thing this woman said was: 'You needn't try the sympathy vote with me.' Then she just walked off and left us there."

Six months later and £4,000 in arrears, the couple were served with an eviction notice, despite the fact that the husband had returned to work and the full mortgage repayment was being paid.

The eviction was cancelled at the last minute only because the couple's branch manager had threatened to resign if it went ahead.

Eventually, the lender agreed to reschedule their repayments to include the arrears, but it penalised them by moving them onto a higher interest rate.

Now in a much healthier financial position, the couple have recently switched their modest €34,000 outstanding balance to Start Mortgages via Mortgagecabin.com, borrowing a further €16,000.

They are being charged an interest rate of 6.5 per cent, which they say is a lower interest rate than what they were on previously.

They say that they would rather approach a loan shark than have to deal with their former lender again.

A Galway-based man fell into arrears on his mortgage. "I got divorced, which cost me a fair bit, and then I lost my job," he says.

"I thought that the easiest way out was to remortgage because the house was worth far more than my mortgage, but no lender would talk to me," he says.

By this stage, he was 11 payments behind on the mortgage.

"They were at the threatening letter stage and the legal stage. I borrowed from the credit union to pay them off - to keep them off my back."

At the same time, he was struggling to pay back a couple of personal loans. "I still had the commitments to make, but I didn't have the money and nobody seemed to understand that."

Earlier this year, he saw a newspaper advertisement for Mortgagecabin.com.

"I had been turned down by everyone, so I expected to be turned down again. I was going to sell the house and I saw this as a last resort."

By this time, he had got another job and the lender took on the case.

The new mortgage was for €140,000 and gave rise to manageable repayments of €940 a month - about €150 less than his total repayments before he remortgaged.

"I don't know what interest rate I am paying, but I do know it is over the odds. So I would like to think that I would repair my credit eventually and move to a lower rate."