Sister was paying PPI before she died

[conductor71]

My sister, who was a spendthrift, died two years ago, after many years of illness, in which her chronic smoking, obesity and diabetes must have been major contributory factors. She had been virtually housebound for several years before her death. She lived alone and died penniless, apparently owing about £10,000 in credit card debt. My elderly mother contacted the credit card company at the time to inform them of her death, but kept none of the correspondence nor any of my sister's credit card statements, so the very little information that I have mainly came from a series of texts I exchanged with my sister about a year before she died.

 

From these texts, it appears that my sister took out PPI many years ago, possibly when she was still working (a rare event in her later years). Some years later when she was arguably no longer capable of working, she suffered a heart attack. It seems that my sister then received a PPI payout, which cleared her (then) £2,000 credit card debt.

 

However, she must have then continued paying PPI premiums after her heart attack until, one year before her death, she admitted to me that she had racked up credit card debt of about £10,000 and was still paying PPI each month, even though she said that she had more or less been led to believe that she wouldn't ever get any further PPI payouts. She told me that she really ought to stop paying the PPI. She said: "I must cancel it [the PPI] but I can't remember how." At that time, all I could do was encourage my sister to contact the CAB. We don't know if she ever bothered to do so before she died, nor whether she cancelled the PPI.

 

What are the chances that my sister would have been due compensation and, if so, from what point in time might this compensation be deemed to start from? I presume that if she received a PPI payout payout after her heart attack, then we could not claim compensation for any premiums paid prior to that payout. However, her health after the heart attack probably made it very unlikely that she would ever have been able to work again and I'm fairly certain that in fact she never did work again, as she was permanently relying on invalidity benefit. A year before she died, she had clearly realised that she was paying PPI for no reason. I have to presume that my sister probably never volunteered any new information at any point about her worsening health and her reliance on invalidity benefit and I presume that the company to whom she was paying PPI probably never asked.

 

Is there a possible case for compensation here? If so, would it be worth claiming, given that she probably owed much more to the credit card company than we would likely be due in compensation for PPI payments.

Edited November 17, 2012 by conductor71

[ims21]

Hi

 

You say our sister dies with no estate.

 

In that case, her debts died with her so there is nothing due to the card company.

 

You also say that her dent to the company would exceed any claim she might make.

 

My view is that it is not worth claiming anything on the account because, although they cannot recover from her estate (there isn't one), anything that could come back will be set against the account anyway.

 

There will be no benefit to her estate.

 

Personally I would be inclined to leave it alone.

[conductor71]

 

My view is that it is not worth claiming anything on the account because, although they cannot recover from her estate (there isn't one), anything that could come back will be set against the account anyway.

 

There will be no benefit to her estate.

 

 

Thanks for this opinion. I guess I was thinking that a potential PPI payout might not be able to be offfset against other outstanding debts.

 

Any other views on this are welcome.