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It's no rare thing to have a family member be a Sucky Customer. There are heaps of threads here detailing such things.
But my sister has seriously pissed me off.
Back story - A good friend of mine (call him 'P', who back in 2001 was best man at my wedding) is a mortgage broker. He set my wife and I up with a great deal which saved us a heap of money by fixing a big part of our mortgage three days before the interest rates started rising in Australia (back in 2006).
In short, he is damned good at what he does, is proactive in letting his customers know about expected changes in rates or circumstances, and is a really nice guy.
In late 2006, I made the rather large mistake of telling my sister (we'll call her 'C', if only because calling her Spawn of Satan, Destroyer of Worlds, Beast of the Great Pit and Cthulu's role model would make this post too long), who was in the process of buying a flat, about P's services.
Cue a three year saga of financial and legal headaches for P.
Rather than spend an hour or so detailing all the idiocy I'll just offer two standout bits of Suckiness that gives you the flavour of the sort of things P had to put up with.
1, the flat C was buying was small, so small that most lenders needed a larger deposit than usual. P managed to get around it with one lender, an impressive feat in and of itself, but which required a fair bit of extra paperwork.
Paperwork that C couldn't be bothered signing.
So P drove to C's place of work (about a 2 hour drive in peak traffic) to get her signature so he could fax the paperwork to the bank by the 5pm cutoff. Was C happy that she got approval for her mortgage without having to front up an extra 30K?
2, C screwed up some information on the application, which for some reason she blamed P for. (Essentially, she gave the wrong account number for the deposit to be taken from, which meant that settlement couldn't go through. The seller needed reimbursement, solicitors on both sides needed fees to sort it out, and the banks wanted their cut.) P ended up paying the fees for her. (He was at this stage trying to establish his business, and desperately wanted every customer of his to tell everyone how good he was at his job. Naive, yes.)
Skipping over the innumerable little bits of suckiness that made P call me to vent regularly over the years, we get to the meat of the story.
My parents had told C about how P fixed part of our mortgage, so she wanted the same service. Only by then, interest rates had been steadily rising, and the fixed rates on offer were all well above the variable rates offered at the time.
P explained that she wouldn't save money that way, but she insisted that he go ahead, because she'd heard that interest rates were still rising. P agreed, but said that the rates wouldn't go high enough for her to actually save money by fixing part of her loan.
C told him to do it anyway, (possibly because her hair dresser told her to) so he went away and found her the best possible deal he could, which would only end up costing her a few hundred extra a year had rates stayed the same.
Enter the Global Financial Crisis.
Interest rates plumeted around the world. In Australia, they fell markedly, but not catestrophically. In our case it happened a few months before our low fixed rate ended, meaning that we'd had the best of both worlds. In C's case, it meant that she was several thousand out of pocket.
So what did C do?
She made a complaint to the Ombudsman.
Yep, in an effort to get the deal she so desperately wanted voided, she made a legal complaint about a good man who was trying to establish a reputation in a cutthroat field.
The Ombudsman told her that she had to at least 'try' to sort things out with P; at the very least actually tell him about her complaint before going down the legal path. The policy said that the two parties needed to do a certain about of mediation first (6 weeks, IIRC).
So C sends P her complaint. P was rather busy, so took all of 10 days to respond. He included signed documents, handwritten notes, and emails between them as proof that he acted in good faith, and tried to talk her out of it.
C waited until 2 days before the end of the mediation period to respond, and her response basically said that she was going to the Ombudsman.
So P had to take time out of his business to respond formally to a frivolous complaint. Despite the strength of his case, he was understandably stressed for a couple of months.
Finally the day of reckoning arrives, and the Ombudsman basically took one look at the 1 page handwritten complaint, and the 50 page response, with each part of the compaint refuted with signed documents, and basically finds completely in P's favour.
At that point, you'd think that P was off the hook, right?
Well, C tells him that she's not accepting the decision, and is taking him to court. Where it will all be public that he's had a complaint against him.
Now, this is a level of suckiness that I honestly wouldn't have thought she could reach. But fortunately, there is a happy ending.
In all her legal adventures to date (she was bullied at work, made a complaint and won), my sister hasn't had to pay any money. She has relied on our parents to supply her with legal councel. And since Dad is paying the bills, he's the one the solicitors talk to.
And since he was told in no uncertain terms that she had no case, and would in all probability end up having to pay P's legal costs, Dad nixed the proceedings before they even started.
And the best bit of all this? C went to another broker and paid nearly 10K in fees to break out of her fixed mortgage and move onto a variable rate loan. Essentially, she spent four years worth of extra interest payments to get onto a cheaper loan. For those who don't know, interest rates have been rising in Australia for a while now, starting a couple of months after she went onto a variable rate.
She's now paying exactly what she was on the fixed rate, and will be paying more from February as the interest rates continue to go up. So even if she had taken P to court, she would have had to answer questions about how much better she would have been financially had she stuck with P rather than sue him.
While I'm glad karma paid her such an expensive visit, I'm seriously pissed at her for taking out her own idiocies out on a good friend of mine.
But my sister has seriously pissed me off.
Back story - A good friend of mine (call him 'P', who back in 2001 was best man at my wedding) is a mortgage broker. He set my wife and I up with a great deal which saved us a heap of money by fixing a big part of our mortgage three days before the interest rates started rising in Australia (back in 2006).
In short, he is damned good at what he does, is proactive in letting his customers know about expected changes in rates or circumstances, and is a really nice guy.
In late 2006, I made the rather large mistake of telling my sister (we'll call her 'C', if only because calling her Spawn of Satan, Destroyer of Worlds, Beast of the Great Pit and Cthulu's role model would make this post too long), who was in the process of buying a flat, about P's services.
Cue a three year saga of financial and legal headaches for P.
Rather than spend an hour or so detailing all the idiocy I'll just offer two standout bits of Suckiness that gives you the flavour of the sort of things P had to put up with.
1, the flat C was buying was small, so small that most lenders needed a larger deposit than usual. P managed to get around it with one lender, an impressive feat in and of itself, but which required a fair bit of extra paperwork.
Paperwork that C couldn't be bothered signing.
So P drove to C's place of work (about a 2 hour drive in peak traffic) to get her signature so he could fax the paperwork to the bank by the 5pm cutoff. Was C happy that she got approval for her mortgage without having to front up an extra 30K?
2, C screwed up some information on the application, which for some reason she blamed P for. (Essentially, she gave the wrong account number for the deposit to be taken from, which meant that settlement couldn't go through. The seller needed reimbursement, solicitors on both sides needed fees to sort it out, and the banks wanted their cut.) P ended up paying the fees for her. (He was at this stage trying to establish his business, and desperately wanted every customer of his to tell everyone how good he was at his job. Naive, yes.)
Skipping over the innumerable little bits of suckiness that made P call me to vent regularly over the years, we get to the meat of the story.
My parents had told C about how P fixed part of our mortgage, so she wanted the same service. Only by then, interest rates had been steadily rising, and the fixed rates on offer were all well above the variable rates offered at the time.
P explained that she wouldn't save money that way, but she insisted that he go ahead, because she'd heard that interest rates were still rising. P agreed, but said that the rates wouldn't go high enough for her to actually save money by fixing part of her loan.
C told him to do it anyway, (possibly because her hair dresser told her to) so he went away and found her the best possible deal he could, which would only end up costing her a few hundred extra a year had rates stayed the same.
Enter the Global Financial Crisis.
Interest rates plumeted around the world. In Australia, they fell markedly, but not catestrophically. In our case it happened a few months before our low fixed rate ended, meaning that we'd had the best of both worlds. In C's case, it meant that she was several thousand out of pocket.
So what did C do?
She made a complaint to the Ombudsman.
Yep, in an effort to get the deal she so desperately wanted voided, she made a legal complaint about a good man who was trying to establish a reputation in a cutthroat field.
The Ombudsman told her that she had to at least 'try' to sort things out with P; at the very least actually tell him about her complaint before going down the legal path. The policy said that the two parties needed to do a certain about of mediation first (6 weeks, IIRC).
So C sends P her complaint. P was rather busy, so took all of 10 days to respond. He included signed documents, handwritten notes, and emails between them as proof that he acted in good faith, and tried to talk her out of it.
C waited until 2 days before the end of the mediation period to respond, and her response basically said that she was going to the Ombudsman.
So P had to take time out of his business to respond formally to a frivolous complaint. Despite the strength of his case, he was understandably stressed for a couple of months.
Finally the day of reckoning arrives, and the Ombudsman basically took one look at the 1 page handwritten complaint, and the 50 page response, with each part of the compaint refuted with signed documents, and basically finds completely in P's favour.
At that point, you'd think that P was off the hook, right?
Well, C tells him that she's not accepting the decision, and is taking him to court. Where it will all be public that he's had a complaint against him.
Now, this is a level of suckiness that I honestly wouldn't have thought she could reach. But fortunately, there is a happy ending.
In all her legal adventures to date (she was bullied at work, made a complaint and won), my sister hasn't had to pay any money. She has relied on our parents to supply her with legal councel. And since Dad is paying the bills, he's the one the solicitors talk to.
And since he was told in no uncertain terms that she had no case, and would in all probability end up having to pay P's legal costs, Dad nixed the proceedings before they even started.
And the best bit of all this? C went to another broker and paid nearly 10K in fees to break out of her fixed mortgage and move onto a variable rate loan. Essentially, she spent four years worth of extra interest payments to get onto a cheaper loan. For those who don't know, interest rates have been rising in Australia for a while now, starting a couple of months after she went onto a variable rate.
She's now paying exactly what she was on the fixed rate, and will be paying more from February as the interest rates continue to go up. So even if she had taken P to court, she would have had to answer questions about how much better she would have been financially had she stuck with P rather than sue him.
While I'm glad karma paid her such an expensive visit, I'm seriously pissed at her for taking out her own idiocies out on a good friend of mine.
Things just weren't getting done, in other words.
In the end, I had to cut my losses--they had to repair most of the things they'd screwed up, reimburse me for the parts they'd lost. I didn't get back the total sum, but at least that mess is over.
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