Payment Protection insurance is an add-on policy designed for credit consumers to help them keep up with their debt payments in times they become unable to because of sickness, accident, or redundancy. And even though figures have shown that there is a reasonable amount of consumers who were able to reap the benefits of this product at the time that they needed it, there is a greater majority that said they were mis-sold.

Normally signed up alongside a loan, credit card, or mortgage, PPI claims are now being lodged by potentially hundreds of thousands of people in hopes of getting back all the money that they paid to it. They all felt cheated by the way it was sold to them.

If you bought PPI at the time you were taking out a credit agreement with any financial institution, you may be entitled for a reclaim if any of the situations below apply to you:

It was not made clear that while deemed necessary, PPI is an optional product and does not determine the approval of your credit application. It doesn’t also say how much loan principal or credit limit you are getting.

You were not informed that you needed to pass certain qualifications – age limit being 18 to 65, without pre-existing medical condition, and employed full time, before you become eligible for cover.

The sales adviser failed to mention that PPI may expire even before the loan is paid off.

Your need of the policy and its suitability to your financial situation was not determined at the time it was offered to you.

If you have established that there was an unlawful manner of signing you up to PPI, you can write to the bank that sold it and demand for a review of your account and refund all the payments you made to it, including the interest that it could have incurred from when you had it. Contact them directly and attach necessary documents to back up you claim.

When presenting evidence that you have had PPI for a while now, you may need to go over every related paperwork in your file cabinet. Check your credit agreement form, statements, and policy certificate for any reference to the insurance policy and include copies of them in your letter.

Banks are required to review PPI claims presented to them. They need to duly look into the details of the account and then refer to all the information they were given to weigh how valid the claim is. You may need to allow them to investigate for roughly 6 or 8 weeks and wait for a decision by then.

If you happen to still doubt your way of making the claim, PPI claims management companies are available to help you with doing it. They can represent you and lodge the claim on your behalf. But having learnt enough information and how to do it, you also have the option of doing it on your own.

If you don’t succeed in claiming your money back on a mis-sold PPI, do not lose hope just yet. Cases like this do not end at the bank right then and there. If your bank decided on something contrary to how valid you claim is, or they neglected their responsibility to contact you with regard to their resolution, you can complain against them at the Financial Ombudsman Service where your dispute can be reviewed once more are resolved accordingly.

In conclusion, although making PPI claims can take a while, you still need to have a go at it and not let the chance to get your money back pass just like that. You also need to be careful next time and ask all the information that you believe you need to know before taking out another financial product like this.