Redundancy with a mortgage

[rasta]

Hi, things have been hanging in the balance with DHs work for a while. One of his managers made a passing comment last week that the company was a "financial sinking ship" We're very worried about redundancy.

We have a mortgage, and heavens forbid, if it came to redundancy, would we get financial help/benefits for our mortgage? (I know house benefit can help with rent but I assume not mortgage?)

DH has been with the company for almost 15 years. I don't work (SAHM to 2 soon to be 3 children).

Can families really cope with a mortgage, outgoings, bills and general family life with no income?

(Also to clarify DH would be job hunting!)

Thank you.

my dh is also facing redundacy as the company he works for went into administration last week.

Can you look at changing your mortgage to an interest only one if things go t**s up?
We have an offset mortgage, which I must admit I've been overpaying into since Woolworths went under as I thought that at some point this would happen, so we do have some breathing space.

You will probably be able to claim council tax benefit, max child tax credit as well as jobseekers allowence (can you tell I've been looking into all this? )

Fingers crossed for both of us

Thank you both so much for responding.

We've got a payment protection plan (I think that's what it's called?! This is all DHs department as you can tell ), which I think kicks in if he's made redundant but not sure of the small print, sort of like a mortgage insurance type thing.

We used to be on interest only payments, but changed around a year ago I think.

At the moment it's just doom and gloom chat, but financially the company is going down the pan due to very poor managerial skills and incompetence in running the company (which is a whole other rant!)

Sorry to hear about your DHs job pink, it's a very grim time

Redundancy can be a terribly worrying thing, I have had a couple of friends made redundant recently. Some of us Mums need to take the control back in our life and start working for ourselves. I've done it and it is so refreshing!

My sister lost her job and now receives housing benefit which pays the interest on her mortgage. Help is available for mortgage payers but doesn't kick in straight away so try to build up some savings if at all possible. Best of luck

If you have mortgage insurance it does pay out for quite a while, but you usually have a period of 3 or 6 month before it kicks in which you will need to self-fund. If it's anything like our policy, It also pays out at whatever payment you agreed at the time, ie if your mortgage payments were £600/month when you took the insurance out, then that's what it will pay, regardless of whether your payments now have increased or decreased. Also, if it's a joint mortgage where you are both named parties being responsible for 50% of the mortgage each, it will pay out 50% of the mortgage payment, not all of it.

Having said that we found it invaluable when my husband was made redundant and, as our mortgage payments had gone down by about 40% from when we took out the policy, the amount it actually paid out each month (50% of the monthly sum at the time of taking out the policy) almost covered the full payment.

A bit long winded but hope that helps.

One thing you have not mentioned : have you checked out if he will be entitled to any sort of redundancy payment? Can anyone else help on this? Normally you are entitled to a week's pay for each year you have worked there -maximum is 12 weeks I do not know if this applies if the company goes bust .

Benefits only kick I when you have less than £16,000 in savings which is a constant thorn in my side - we were careful enough to save our money and now we get nothing, if we had spent it on fags we'd be getting help... Rant over, mortgage insurance relief is available when you have less than £16,000 but what worries me is that if we get that low on funds we probably should have put house on the market by then...it's awful isn't it? Go to direct.gov.uk and search for benefit calculator to see what you can get.

Kick in...

My policy kicked in when I was made redundant. It was such a big help. There was a qualifying period of one month and it took aaaaggeeess to get them to pay out and I had to sort out regular paperwork from the job centre for them. They also put me in touch with a careers adviser who looked over my cv for me and advised on how to improve it. Dug out that paperwork now!!