‘My income is down 70% but I am still waiting for a mortgage break’

A SELF-employed man who has lost up to 70 per cent of his salary as a result of the Coronavirus crisis says he is still waiting to get a break on his mortgage from AIB two months after first applying for it.

AIB, however, told The Kerryman this week that the bank has processed roughly 50,000 payments to date and pointed out that customers can apply to have their ‘payment holiday’ backdated.

The businessman, who does not wish to be identified, said he has never defaulted on his mortage, and with just three years left of payments, had hoped to access the COVID break with no great difficulty.

But two months after first applying for the mortgage break he is still paying it out.

The businessman told The Kerryman that he does not now know if he will now be able to pay May’s mortgage instalment as his livelihood has deteriorated further in the past month due to the effects of the virus: “It’s possible I won’t make my mortgage payment this month. I still have to pay my insurance liabilities, my VHI and various other bills as the only breadwinner in the house. We have to survive. I have never been in arrears on my mortgage. I never defaulted, not even in the recession of 2008.

“There should have been no question as far as I’m concerned, just a blanket break given immediately the same as it is for everyone in the country in the short-term response to the pandemic.”

He said that staff at his local AIB branch in Kerry were very sympathetic and understanding of his plight, helping him as much as they could. But he said they informed him they were not allowed to contact the national COVID relief team responsible for processing the payment ‘ holidays’.

“I rang my local bank first to get a break and they advised me to go onto the website and fill out the form for a short-term break COVID-19 Mortgage Break. I got a call back to say that I might not get the break for the first post- COVID mortgage payment in March as they might not have the application processed by then. I fully accepted that. I filled it out. It proved I couldn’t make my payments. I got a call back from an AIB COVID relief team member asking questions like ‘why did I want a mortgage break?’ ‘is it only for a short-term I would be taking the break?’ They said everything was fine.

“I came off that call thinking I was approved. That was March. Weeks later I lost even more of my income stream as the industry I work in got hit harder by the ongoing restrictions. The next thing I knew my April payment was taken.”

On contacting the relief team again, he was informed that his application had not been processed but claims they could not tell him why it hadn’t been. He was again asked to resubmit his application. “That was early last week, he said in the meantime that I should reapply. I told him I wouldn’t do it, I said that if the interest rate rose or fell they would put it onto my account straight away without any glitches, but they couldn’t do the same for me.”

He is now waiting with bated breath in the hope his monthly repayment will not be drawn down in May.

A spokesperson for AIB said: “AIB’s primary focus is supporting our customers and the economy through COVID-19, and we have processed c.50,000 payment breaks for impacted customers to date. While we cannot comment on individual cases, we have attempted to speak to the customer in question in order to resolve the matter.

“Any customer who has applied for a payment break which was not processed before their mortgage payment was debited from their account can apply to have the amount reversed to their account and their payment holiday backdated. If any customer needs assistance in this regard they should contact our dedicated COVID-19 Mortgage Line on 01 772 6609.”