MORTGAGE SURPRISE FOR HOMEOWNERS

HAS your mortgage payment gone down – and you don’t know why? Users of the popular website Askaboutmoney (AAM) have figured it out.

This week people on AAM began reporting that AIB has at long last started implementing a recent Ombudsman’s decision on a tracker mortgage issue.

AAM campaigned for nearly 6,000 AIB customers who took out a fixed-rate mortgage, between 2006 and 2008.

‘When their contract ended, AIB should have offered them a tracker mortgage at the prevailing rate, but did not do so,’ said AAM founder Brendan Burgess.

‘We took a test case to the Financial Services and Pensions Ombudsman who upheld our complaint in January (2020).’

AIB has agreed to apply the Ombudsman’s decision to all 5,907 affected customers but it did not appear to make any public statement or write recently to the mortgage holders involved.

‘Users of askaboutmoney will understand what is going on but many people will be looking at their mortgage balance and seeing it reduce and they won’t have a clue about what is going on,’ Mr Burgess said.

A spokesman for AIB said the bank had ‘previously communicated’ to customers who were involved in the Ombudsman’s ruling.

‘If customers have any queries they can call our FSPO mortgage review helpline on 0818 300 070.’ Zoom may have become the lockdown video-call app of choice for many people but Skype came out on top in a consumer study by Which? magazine.

It was close, however.

Skype gets five out of five stars for background noise and speech quality and four for pretty much everything else to win an overall score of 73%.

Zoom comes fifth in the top five but isn’t far behind, also scoring five stars for speech quality.