YOU HAVE YOUR SAY
EVERY week Money Mail receives hundreds of your letters and emails about our stories. Here are some from last week’s report about how elderly homeowners who took out shared appreciation mortgages in the Nineties now owe their bank ten times what they originally borrowed . . .
TO TAKE out one of these loans you had to get advice from a professional. What I can’t understand is why the adviser didn’t tell them to run a mile. Y. R., Manchester.
IF HOUSE prices hadn’ t increased, then the people in the story would have effectively had an interest-free loan. Not bad when interest rates were about 7 pc at the time.
No one expected house prices to rise as they did, but I don’t think that’s the banks’ fault. P. C., Coleraine, N. Ireland.
SHARED appre ciation mortgages don’t sound that different to the equity release loans of today, except what you pay back is pegged to house prices. I’m sure we’ll be talking about equity release in the same way in the future. W. S., Winchester, Hants.
I REALISE the people who took out these loans would have known they’d have to pay more if house prices rose, but the terms are extortionate. Someone needs to put pressure on the owners of these loans to come to a fair settlement. M. P., Edinburgh.
YOU can quite easily blame both parties in this story: the banks shouldn’t have been offering such rip-off terms, but on the other hand, the people in this story shouldn’t have taken out the loans. T. L., London.
IT’S easy to criticise these people, saying they should have known what they were getting into, but not everyone is financially savvy — and these loans were complicated.
I think the people who own these loans now should write off a lot of the debt to help out these poor people. G. S., Essex.
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