Related Articles
My elderly mother’s savings account, from where her care fees are paid, has been frozen for four months. It has nearly £100,000 in it.
I have power of attorney for managing my mother’s affairs, and I registered this with Charter Savings Bank in July. Soon after, it declared that there was suspected fraud on my mother’s account and locked us out. My mother’s care home costs £8,000 a month, so we need access to this money to pay the bills.
When I spoke to the bank it asked for identity documents and I supplied passports and birth certificates as well as home addresses. Unfortunately, the care home invoice displayed the address of its head office instead of the care home she lives in. This became a problem because the address the care home gave didn’t match up with the one our mother had put down as her home address. I eventually had to get a signed letter from the care home to explain the discrepancy and send it to the bank.
• After two replacement gearboxes, I’m still getting nowhere
After all this, I was told that everything was in order, but while I can now access the account online, I am still unable to withdraw funds. The bank is aware of the issue and has agreed to transfer £40 as an apology. This has not been received — not that anyone could withdraw it anyway.
Even if we do get access, this is a notice account that requires 60 days notice before I can withdraw any money. This has made me even more stressed.
Over the past four months I have been able to find the funds to pay the care home fees elsewhere, but I just cannot sustain this. I don’t have the money for this month. What should I do now? Please can you help?
Name and address supplied
Holly Thomas writes
Care home fees are a significant outlay for those who, like your mother, do not get their fees paid by a local authority. The £97,000 in her Charter Savings Bank account should give her and your family peace of mind that she has the means to stay where she is comfortable for at least 12 months. To suddenly lose access to those funds must have been terribly distressing.
I tried to get Charter to share what the initial problem had been, but it would not say because it would give fraudsters information about the kind of thing that triggers security procedures. While security is paramount to protecting our wealth, it can often also be a huge barrier to getting at our own money.
• Barclays won’t let my elderly friend get at her £7k in cash Isas
You made ten phone calls and submitted two online complaints but still couldn’t get access to the account, yet when I contacted the bank it moved with lightning speed and withdrawals were authorised the next day.
Charter Savings Bank has offered you £240 in apology (this included the £40 you had already been promised) and agreed to waive your requirement to give notice of withdrawals.
It said: “We’re sincerely sorry for the difficulties encountered, as it is clear that our service fell short. While additional security checks are sometimes necessary to ensure that transactions are genuine and not related to fraudulent activity, on this occasion there were unacceptable delays.
“We’re grateful to the account holder’s daughter for working with us and confirm that she has full access to the account. We will be using her valuable feedback to review our processes.”
You are relieved to now be able to pay your mother’s care home fees without worry and plan to move all the money into an easy access account so that you can pay bills without any time lag.
Although having power of attorney may have actually created a problem for you in this case, it should be a vital tool that is supposed to make it easier to manage the affairs of a family member who no longer has capacity to do it themselves. Once you have power of attorney, it’s worth contacting financial institutions and utility companies to register it as soon as you can. This means that when the time comes that you need to deal with matters of money on someone’s behalf, it should be much more straightforward.
Where is my £1,164 refund?
I accidentally overpaid £1,164.73 on the service charge account on a flat my wife and I own and rent out in December last year. A couple of months later I realised my mistake. I had made a duplicate payment having forgotten that I had already settled the balance.
To complicate matters, the managing agents had changed hands, and I had paid the old agent, FirstPort.
When I spoke to FirstPort it agreed to refund me within ten working days, which was a relief. But no money arrived so I called again, and another refund was promised — but never materialised. Since then I have been back and forth trying to get our money returned.
In more recent communications I was told it was the responsibility of the new agents to refund me. But they just sent me back to FirstPort. I have not had any replies to emails from FirstPort since August and am at a loss as to where to turn. While the overpayment was clearly an error on my part, I can see no reason why the money should not simply be refunded.
MB, address supplied
Holly Thomas writes
Speaking from experience, service charges on flats are painful enough without accidentally paying double and then having to try to claw the money back. You say it’s very unlike you to make such an error, but at the time you had just sold a small business and were completing 2023/2024 tax returns, which was rather stressful. When you came across the service charge demand you settled it without checking whether you had already paid.
I find it very difficult to understand why companies take so long to refund customers who have made a payment by mistake.
There’s no standard protocol for recovering money sent to the wrong place so it’s important to chase, which you did, yet after months of being given the runaround you were no closer to getting your money back.
• Shares I bought in 1994 are up 530% — if only I knew where they were
I contacted FirstPort on your behalf, because that’s where you sent the overpayment in December last year. The firm still insisted that the new managing agent was the one that should repay your money, but it agreed to ping the money back into your bank account — just as it had promised to do for you in January, only this time, it followed through.
FirstPort said: “We appreciate this delay is inconvenient to the customer and so we have decided to process the refund ourselves as a gesture of goodwill. We will follow up with the new managing agent separately to address the issue.”
I suspect that the volume of payments made in error must be on the up with the rise of digital banking and people paying bills on the go. It’s all too easy to tap the wrong button in a hurry. But because the faster payments service used by banks means that money can be transferred between accounts almost instantaneously, I see no reason why, if a business confirms that they have located the funds, they cannot process a refund just as quickly
£2,048,233.73 — the amount Your Money Matters has won back for readers so far this year
If you have a money problem you would like the Times or Sunday Times to investigate, email yourmoneymatters@thetimes.co.uk. Please include a phone number
Source link
