My wife and I signed a four-year lease agreement with Volvo for one of its XC40 models in October last year. We didn’t realise that my wife was expecting twins, however.
When they were born in June, it soon became apparent that our family of five – me, my wife, toddler and twin babies – could not all fit in the car.
We asked to get out of the contract, but Volvo said we would be breaking it with three years left to run and would have to stump up the 40pc early termination fee of £6,384 on the £15,960 that is left to pay. Please help.
K. F., Warrington, Cheshire.
Sally Hamilton replies: When you took delivery of your smart new Volvo SUV, it seemed the perfect car for a family of four – which is the type of vehicle you were expecting it to be. Your wife had fallen pregnant by this time, but it would be many weeks before you received the exciting news you were having twins.
However, once your boys were born in early June, you and your wife were driven to distraction when trying to squeeze your new family of five into the space available. Essentially, the vehicle was too small for you all to travel together.
You were frustrated by the fact the middle rear seat has no Isofix point – the device that allows child seats to click directly into fixed points in a car. And when the two baby seats are installed in the spaces either side, you found there was no usable space left for your three-year-old son’s seat to be attached with a seat belt.
The current lease means you must make monthly payments over four years and hand the vehicle back to Volvo at the end of the period. Feeling trapped, you wondered about switching the deal to take on a bigger member of the XC range, but this was way beyond your budget (which you’d already maximised with your existing arrangement). You dismissed the idea of getting a second car to help ferry everyone around as equally unaffordable.
If you could end the lease on the Volvo – which has 35 of the original 48 months left to run – that would enable you to seek out a manageable lease on a second-hand alternative that could accommodate the whole family. But when you approached Volvo in July, it said no, and a further complaint led to a final rejection in August.
Meanwhile, the strain had been mounting on you for other reasons. Your twins have plagiocephaly, which means they both wear corrective helmets 23 hours a day to help reshape flattened areas of their skulls.
This means the family must travel to many medical appointments, and the difficulty of getting all the children in the car was making daily life stressful. In addition, taking the family to visit your father, who is currently in hospital with cancer and an hour’s drive away, was nigh on impossible.
I felt sympathy with your plight and, with such extenuating circumstances, reckoned Volvo might reconsider your position and let you off the hook for the termination fee on a goodwill basis.
It has done nothing wrong contractually by rejecting your claim to escape the deal early and have the fee expunged. But as a brand that highlights its appeal to families, I thought it could be more flexible and save you the bother of going to the Financial Ombudsman to rule on your complaint – the only route you believed left after the car-maker issued its final response to your complaint in August.
After I stepped in to plead your case, I am pleased to say Volvo switched up several gears and, within a couple of days, had reversed its decision and agreed to let you exit the contract at no cost – saving you £6,384.
You and your wife were over the moon. When we caught up this week, you said Volvo is due to pick up the car on Friday.
Meanwhile, you’re putting the pedal to the metal in your search for a second-hand, seven-seater alternative, also on lease.
Why isn’t my teachers pension paying out?
I worked full-time as a teacher from 1995 to 2003 from which I am due a pension from the Teachers’ Pension Scheme. This should have started paying out when I turned 60 in April – it is now September and I still haven’t received anything. Can you please help?
Name withheld
Sally Hamilton replies: The Teachers’ Pension Scheme has not kept to its timetable.
The scheme says it aims to process retirement benefit applications within ten working days of receiving all the necessary information. About 10,000 teachers retire each year, which is a significant number, but this should be no surprise to the pension administrators.
You completed and returned the forms in January – three months before your retirement date – and waited to receive the monthly payment from your 60th birthday. But nothing came.
Had any of your pupils been this poor at delivering their homework, you would have handed them a detention.
You made contact in May and were told it required your birth certificate. You hadn’t been told this previously but sent a copy regardless. It confirmed nothing further was needed to process your pension.
Another month passed and still nothing. You phoned again and no one could explain the reason for the delay but, to be sure, they posted new forms.
Did the dog eat the first set? And maybe the second set, too, as they did not arrive either.
When you contacted me in mid-September, your frustration was at boiling point. The pension was almost six months overdue, and you estimated you were owed about £3,300.
On my intervention, the Teachers’ Pension Scheme finally got its act together and within a day had contacted you to apologise – but neither you nor I got an explanation for the hold-up.
However, you confirmed that the back payments were in your account a few days later.
The scheme pulled its socks up eventually, but my report on the handling of your application is ‘could do better’.