Hi,
I think my query could be similar to Handy. I dont want to bore people with all the dates and details but in essence my query is whether anyone has gone back to their back following being put back onto a tracker to seek compensation ie. the difference betweeen the fixed rate that they were on and the tracker that they would have been on if they had know they were entitled to be on it?
Took out tracker (.85%) mortgage in 2006. In mid-2007 following rapid climbing of ECB we fixed for 2 years at 5.1%. At the end of this period we automatically went onto a variable rate which Bank of Ireland admitted what incorrect in their letter of May 2011 when they wrote to us to say we were one of 2,000 odd customers who will have their trackers reinstated following a review of our mortage by the Central Bank. Happy days... but always a twist. They would reinstate the tracker at the end of our current fixed rate (we signed a new 3 year fixed rate 4.2% the day before we received this letter) so we would get our tracker back but not until May 2014! They also were 'giving' us €2,000 for the time we were on the variable (approx 9 months) when we could and should have been on our tracker in 2007/8. Again the twist was that they were going to put that €2,000 into our mortgage account. So after a few weeks of making alot of noise and alot of phone calls, emails, letters and waiting on decisions etc, they agreed to put us back onto the tracker immediately with no break out penalty for breaking the brand new fixed rate agreement and to put the €2,000 into our current account.
So should be happy with all that? Well, its not sitting right with me that due to the uncertainty of variable rates and not knowing we were entitled to our original tracker rate of ECB +.085%, we decided to fix for the second period of 2 years at 3.15% again. By their own admission, we were entitled to be on the tracker prior to this and so if this had been known to us, why on earth would we have chose to fix at 3.15% when the ECB was at 1% at that time making the rate we should have been on 1.85%. Has anyone been in this position and considered this financial loss due to being misinformed and mismanaged by the bank? I am thinking that we were paying approx 1.5% more over two years than we should have been if all the facts had been made known to us. I would be grateful for any feedback, thoughts or details of similar situations that people have experienced in this regard.