Lump sums on mortgage confusion

One_Of_Shanks

I seem to be having a bit of trouble with BOI recently involving several payments I made in an effort to get my repayments down on mortgage.

I made several online banking 365 transfers from my current account and from our joint savings account to our mortgage account and each time the amounts were in the bracket of 2-5k.
And each time the repayments went down and everything was fine.

But then recently I made several more in the exact same manner, only difference being the amounts were smaller. 500 and 600 etc.
On these occasions the repayments did NOT go down and when i rang they just kept saying they'd look into it bla bla bla.

Eventually today I got talking to a chap who explained that the recent smaller amounts have come off the capital/term rather than the repayments.
But I really need and intended the amounts to come off the repayments not the term. Reason being I am going to be taking a wage decrease soon and it's important that the repayments come down so that we can cope.

BOI just keep saying the "manner in which the payments have been paid recently is the reason why it has been put towards term/capital rather than repayments" but that's complete nonsense because I've done it online in the exact same fashion as the previous ones which had always come off the repayments.
The only pattern I can spot to explain it is that the amounts lately have been smaller.

Is there anything I can do to make them put all recent transfers towards lowering repayments instead of capital/term?
I seem to be banging my head against a brick wall with them.

Thanks in advance for any advice

phormium

Some banks have a minimum amount that is considered a lump sum, amounts below this are just considered pre payment of the repayments. It sounds like this is what is happening but if so you'd think they would be explaining it better!

One_Of_Shanks

phormium wrote: »

Some banks have a minimum amount that is considered a lump sum, amounts below this are just considered pre payment of the repayments. It sounds like this is what is happening but if so you'd think they would be explaining it better!

ah fair enough, yeah that would make sense. Just weird that none of the people I spoke to on the phone could tell me that.
But yeah I'm guessing you're spot on.

phormium

Usually when you accumulate enough for the minimum lump sum payment you can then request a recalculation so for example if you make 6 x €500 payments your mortgage would be showing a prepayment credit of 3k, you could then ask for that to be applied fully so that the repayments would drop.

coylemj

You are clearly on a variable rate, otherwise they wouldn't have reduced the monthly repayment in response to the lump sum payments you made. They must have decided that it isn't worth their while going to the bother of calculating a new schedule if new lump sums are below a certain level. Not sure how you can force them to do that.

One_Of_Shanks

Cheers for the replies. Finally got sorted today and yee were right about the amounts being too small. When i pointed out that there were several of them and wanted them combined and moved against the repayments now in one go they finally did it.

Bit frustrating that they couldn't have just told me that was the problem in the first place but thankfully all sorted now

cheers again for the help.

phormium

Serious shortage of experienced staff left in banks! Probably no one knew the answer

impr0v

BOI is particularly bad in this respect, in my experience.

Toots

impr0v wrote: »

BOI is particularly bad in this respect, in my experience.

They did a voluntary redundancy package and a LOT of the old experienced staff left.

My brother in law found the same thing when he was making extra payments on his mortgage. What he ended up doing was piling 2 or 3 of the smaller lumps together and lodging it as one - it saved him the hassle of trying to chase it up otherwise.