Cavemen and Mortgages

Back in the stone ages, if Ug want cave then Ug just took cave and if someone was already in it then Ug chase them with big stick. Ug would live happily in his abode until he got old and knackered at the grand old age of thirty and some young whipper snapper called Zog would chase him out of the cave with a big scary stick.

Now we live in more civilised times and we can't just go round chasing people out of houses, so we have rules about ownership, the purchase of property and this has resulted in the creation of a neccessary evil: the mortgage. I don't know where the word mortgage derives from but the fact that the first four letters are French for death should be a warning to everyone.

Here I am at the age of thirty and while I'm glad I don't need to fight over a hole in a rock I'm still not sure that mortgages are a huge step forward from stick to stick combat. You see me and my wife are buying a flat and we're living through the hell of getting a mortgage.

We had put an offer in for a lovely flat but we hadn't yet got the mortgage sorted out so we needed to act fairly quickly if for no other reason than to show we're no slouches. I'd read good things about the Alliance and Leicester's new super cheap mortgage - I'm kind of averse to spending loads of money so this suited us down to the ground. I got my paper work together and embarked on filling in their online application form. If I'd had to fill out a form like this when I was a child, my dad would've described as "character building". At the end I then had to hold my breath and type in my credit card details for a payment of £250 for a surveyor.

I hate paying for surveyors, particularly when it's just a valuation. They walk into the middle of a room, swivel their head around, scribble something on a clipboard and then move to the next room getting the whole interior done in about two minutes. They then walk outside with the smallest ladder in the world and pretend to inspect the guttering. How two and a half minutes of this is worth £250 is anyone's guess.

The day after the surveyor had worked up a sweat in our prospective property we got an intrguing letter. Apparently the A&L had declined our mortgage. Nothing else, just that they'd declined our mortgage. To tell you how infurating this is, imagine you go to a nightclub. You go to the foyer and pay ten pounds to get in. You then go through the next set of doors to go into the club and some bouncers block your path. "You can't go in there mate, you're not wearing a tie."
"But I've just paid a tenner"
"Not my problem mate: no tie, no entry"
"So why didn't the guy selling the tickets stop me?"
"Cos stopping people is our job."
"Yeah, it's demarcation mate." pipes up the other bouncer
"Then why aren't you outside?" you say
"Club policy. Now are you going to f**k off or do we have to smash face in?"
"What about my money?"
"What about it? Now f**k off!"

Strangely the neandrethals who own nightclubs know they can't run their businesses like that so why don't the apparently sophisticated and inteligent people of A&L?

Well enough of analogies, it was time to find out why I'd been refused so I called them up. In this modern age of ours A&L has a customer care line much like any other bank or building society ("press 1 for endless music on hold, press 2 for an uninformative recorded message") but there is one weird thing about it: customised hold music. Over the top of the most anemic guitar playing I've ever heard, a collection of men and women sing "yea, yea, yea, yea" as if trying to lull you to sleep. "Yea, yea, yea, yea" they continue, then they sing "Alliance and Leicester" in hushed tones so as not to wake the baby. This masterpiece of monotony is only thirty seconds long, so if you are a customer you better grow to like it. The idea of the music is of course to calm down angry customers and make them more relaxed but there's a spanner in the works. The music is constantly interrupted by a woman's voice, and I would venture not a professional voice over artiste, bellowing in a thick, smokey Mancunian accent "Your call is important to us. Please Hold".

When I finally get through, the rather startling reason for us being refused is that I don't earn any money. Well many people have questioned if I earn my money but I do go to work and in return the cash fairy leaves money in my account. No, it seems what she means is that they've lost my salary details and that has lead to the failure of our application. So, she tells me I'll have to appeal their decision by writing to the underwriters. I ask if there is any chance of just speaking to them and sorting it out right this minute, but it appears that the underwriters are a deity who do not give audiences to lowly mortals. Only a letter will do. I felt tempted to ask if sacrificing a goat might help things along but the conversation had already got silly enough.

In the meantime we received our A&L application form. The form was supposed to have all the information I'd already typed into the web site however it bore little relation to it. If we sent off this form off we might buy the wrong house by mistake. The attached letter said if we corrected any details we must initial the changes but to do so would have left it looking like a New York Subway train.

A couple of days later I rang to check if my letter had been received only to learn that it's taking them four days to get first class post and then it'll take another three days to review. This would mean a grand total of three and half weeks spent on our mortgage application since we began and zero progress made. That's when it sunk in: the Alliance & Leicester are crap.

We then decided that no matter what the consequences, we'd go with Nationwide. I rang them up and they agreed in principle to a mortgage in half an hour. So let's do some sums. A&L took two weeks to refuse so assuming that A&L spent eight hours a day, five days a week trying to find a calculator, that makes the Nationwide 160 times quicker.

I don't want to speak too soon but the indications from the Nationwide are very good. All of the call centre staff are the most helpful I've encountered and they seem entirely unafraid to offer dates for when things should happen.

Having said that if the Nationwide mess this up, I'll be going round their chairman's house in tiger skin pants and a big stick to chase him out of his home. Grrrrr!