Entry for March 28, 2007

I have had an unpleasant evening delving into the dark crevices of the family paperwork. It was not a nice place to be.
I found a darkly worded warning from my endowment company stating that my policy is now at the RED ALERT stage. That is to say, the policy will not do what I expected it would when I took it out i.e. pay off the mortgage. With the paperwork was a kind leaflet from the mortgage company explaining how I could seek compensation from the person who sold me the policy because of the extremely shoddy advice I received.
This sounds like good news. Compensation - ahhh - the mortgage paid off; me sipping mint julips out of the wife's new golden slippers; the sun setting on my debt free residence. However there is a flaw, and the flaw is this - it was me that sold the policy to myself. Because back in the good old unregulated days of financial services, when all good financial advisers wor a pair of chaps and a sixgun, my firm had an agency with the endowment company.
Actually the whole endowment mis-selling thing annoys me. Everyone had them. Everyone thought they were the best thing around at the time and we all knew or should have known there were no guarantees with those policies. But everyone wanted the cheapest mortgage they could get. I know I did. And frankly, without the endowment mortgage I probably couldn't have afforded the first flat.
Sometimes things go wrong. Sometimes it's no-one's fault.