Owning your own home

“Managed to get L&C to escalate it today so hopefully hear back tomorrow finally…”

i hope you fare better than we did with barclays, had several “by close of play” “by end of week” “in 24hrs” “it’s been sent to completions escalation team”
promises but the the plug bets pulled on the 3 sales/moves tomorrow after 8 months of shithousery from buyers/solicitors/lenders.

Ah lovely, just what I wanted to hear!

Such a shit process, not sure I even want the flat any more, but here we are

Whilst I was unimpressed with L&C, Nationwide were great. I was given an estimate of 5 working days turnaround both times something was escalated after the L&C fuckery; the first turnaround was under 48h, the second was in 24h.

What are people with loft conversions doing about home insurance now, I'm pretty sure more than 50% of my roof is flat now as it's an L dormer and that seems to be a nightmare with insurance quotes.

I always said my roof was 50pc flat or less. It's not an exact science so who could blame someone if they got it slightly wrong. In the event you made a claim and the roof was technically 60pc or whatever I don't think they'd decline the claim, they'd probably just make you pay the difference in the premiums between what you paid and what you should have paid

I'm working on a project with huge contractor negligence mishaps. The insurance provider walked away from the claim due to inaccuracies the client gave at the inception of the policy. I suspect this was in part due to the size of the overall claim, but I would never want to rely on goodwill from an insurance provider for misreported information.

OK cool, I'll just do that then (edit - after seeing the above, maybe not 😂) The only company I know that won't work on is pedalcover as they categorically won't cover over 50% so the policy would get cancelled. I asked if you could pay a premium but was told no, their underwriters wouldn't cover it.

Fingers crossed

Sure you're liable for it. But it's the difference between paying everything upon granting of probate or some after you've finally sold the house.

The system is screwed, if there's no cash but an expensive house in the estate how do you pay the probate bill, I'm pretty sure my parents had to cash in savings at the time then take the extra money from the sale compared to their siblings.

if there's no cash but an expensive house in the estate how do you pay the probate bill

I'm pretty sure you get a grace period. I can't remember the exact details.

EDIT: Not quite. You can pay in annual instalments (up to 10) which will lessen the impact. When the property sells you then have to pay the full amount.

Thanks @princeperch and @EstelleGetty managed to get it sorted in the end, went through homeprotect underwritten by axa, it's weird because I'm already with axa but they wouldn't let me put my cargo bike on the policy and its too expensive but homeprotect will.

Anyway happy it's all sorted and I can ditch laka, who have been charging me through the nose.

Thanks for the advice re valuation. I should have said the house isn't in London and therefore iht is not going to be an issue...

In that case it's really just the point about capital gains tax that is relevant

Do you know who owned the property i.e. who is named on the deeds as it may not be as straightforward as you think.

Your late grandad may have added your mum and her siblings onto the deeds at some time in the past and should have undertaken a valuation at that time. Now that he has died and the property is in your mum and siblings name there may be CGT to pay on the increase in valuation from whenever the deed of ownership changed to today.

This will also be based on any percentage that your mum owes e.g. it may have been grandfather owned 50% and the remainder split equally amongst the children.

It wouldn't be misreported information. They don't insist on it being absolutely accurate - how could they ? On my old house there was a front pitched roof , a front dormer flat roof, a rear dormer flat roof then a section of the outrigger was pitched. I'll be damned if I'm measuring it all up and providing them with an inch by inch report as to what it what.

constructive knowledge

You also aren't under an obligation to over guess the size of the roof. If it were such a big deal they'd insist on a report from a professional with specific measurements or they'd look it up themselves during the underwriting process on Google earth. On a bog standard terraced house with a loft conversion like I used to own the roof would be, at a best guess about 50 pc flat, but it could very easily have been marginally more or marginally less. If it's a matter of such gravity it wouldn't be left to an unsophisticated client with a fairly glib and brief question about it during the initial screening process.

I'd very happily again give the same answer particularly if there was a very significant delta in resulting premiums.

Don't forget trusts which may have been triggered on the death of a spouse.

When my FIL died, a trust was triggered to share the house with my MIL and the executors.

When my MIL died, we found out that my BIL (a literal world class legal academic*) had fucked the probate up, and no set up the trust.

You might well imagine the CGT and IHT shenanigans that this prompted.

We had a local solicitor (a literal market town class legal professional) sort it out.

* and yet, still a massive fucking idiot.

insist on a report

Why would they? All the risk sits with you I think and they get their money regardless.

If your house has 90pc flat roof and you outright lie about it then fair enough. If it's marginal or borderline whether it's 50 or 60pc and they expect you to both know and take an informed view on it, then I'd say that would possibly be an unfair contract term potentially caught under UCTA or whatever the relevant statute is nowadays.

I'd say that would possibly be an unfair contract term potentially caught under UCTA or whatever the relevant statute is nowadays.

UCTA wouldn't apply. It only applies to exclusion clauses, and the right of an insurer to treat a policy as void if it's procured through a misrepresentation isn't an exclusion clause.

Today hasn't been a waste then. Thank you.

By way of extending my line of thought :

In 2018 we had a rescue cat. He got very sick and needed an operation. He croaked it shortly afterwards. Total bill was 3k or so. I paid the bill and filed an insurance claim.

The insurance company wrote to me saying I had made a mistake when I took out the policy as the rescue centre had paperwork which said the cat was born in 2011 rather than 2012 as I had put on the paperwork.

They said they would happily pay the claim however I owed them £30 quid in adjustments to historical premium payments which I then paid and they then paid me the 3 large less then excess.

If you get the calculation of your flat roof percentage marginally wrong I strongly suspect something similar would happen should you be unfortunate enough to have to make a claim unless there was clear evidence you tried to diddle then from the get go.

At some point in the past someone painted the front and side of our house with waterproof paint.
It's causing some issues so we would like it stripped off.
Has anyone got any recommendations for companies that do this sort of thing? I've done a quick Google and it's thrown up some but thought I'd ask here first.

The back of our house is painted with similar stuff, sort of shiny and looks oil based. I wondered how it would be removed. Blasting it off would probably trash the rendering?

Ours is brick, I would definitely expect the pointing to need some attention after paint was removed