Having spoken to you, I know this isn’t what you hope to hear — because you want her to give up — but the answer is: it will not affect the cover at all. As long as you and your wife were truthful at the time you made the application, then the policy will remain in force, no matter what bad habits either of you adopts subsequently.

However, if you were thinking of reinsuring elsewhere with another company, you would then have to declare her smoking, which would in all likelihood bump up the premiums.

Insurance bill was for cancelled card

JS writes: I am a financial adviser and have been trying to help a client sort out his problem with MBNA. He cancelled his MBNA credit card in the summer, having not used it for a couple of years, but has since been billed £70 by CPP (the Card Protection Plan, which provides insurance cover for lost or stolen cards). Despite writing several times to CPP and MBNA, I have not been able to get this debit removed.

The CPP renewal premium was automatically debited to the card three years after the initial insurance was taken out. Although your client may well have received notification from CPP that this was about to happen, he probably dumped it as junk mail given that he no longer had a card.

This should have been a simple problem to sort out, and indeed it was. MBNA sorted it out within an hour of my contacting it.

What a pity, then, that four letters to CPP, one to MBNA and a call to each from you and your client had failed to achieve anything. Anyway, the debt is now wiped out, the protection plan cancelled, and your client very relieved.

Shares seemed to vanish into thin air

AS writes: At Standard Life’s demutualisation I was allocated 231 shares and elected to keep them and buy more at a discounted price. The statement I received shortly afterwards showed the 231 shares, together with a note saying any stock purchased would be shown on my next statement. My £2,000 cheque for the extra shares was cashed, but I still have no record of them, despite having made at least seven calls to the company and its registrars.

After much effort on your part, you were eventually sent a further statement, which still showed only 231 shares in your name.

Standard Life has now got to the bottom of this. It realised that by mistake it did not add your extra shares to the Standard Life nominee account where your original shares were held.

The extra 915 shares have now been added to this account and you should by now have got an amended, and accurate, statement to show this.

Daughter’s name is on our deeds

DC writes: My wife and I had our house repossessed in 1991 for mortgage arrears. In 1995, we bought a flat for £62,500 with a cash deposit and a mortgage in our daughter’s name. We have now repaid the mortgage and are thinking of selling. The flat is valued at £170,000. The deeds are in our daughter’s name and she is concerned that she will be liable for capital-gains tax, as she already owns her own house. Is it possible to convince Revenue & Customs that it never belonged to our daughter and was our own sole property, and that the only reason the mortgage was in her name was because of our poor credit rating?

I hope so, and think so, but I have to warn you that it is not wholly black and white.

I ran your problem past John Whiting, senior tax partner of Price Waterhouse Coopers, and he gave the following advice.

The starting point has to be that the house is in the daughter’s name, so it is hers. That means, as she already owns her own property, there will be a CGT bill.

But that doesn’t seem a fair result, so I would try to argue that “beneficial ownership” has always been with you, the parents. Points in favour of this would be: that you funded the cash deposit and the mortgage payments; that you repaid the mortgage from your own funds; that on the sale of the property, the proceeds would belong to you, not your daughter; and that there were valid, non-tax driven, reasons for following this route.

When you sell, the situation would have to be disclosed to the Revenue, but you should explain the whole situation and put these arguments as to why there should be no liability.

There may, said Whiting, be further legal arguments one way or the other, so I would welcome any contributions from readers on this point.

A self-help guide for lazy graduates

RK writes: Can you please help or advise me with a problem I have with HSBC? And WW writes: I am a distressed customer of Barclays, and I would be obliged if you could help me with my problem.

RK and WW both had problems arising from loans taken out when they were students, and both were being chased by debt collectors.

It’s pointless going into details, except to say that in both cases, following my contacts with the banks, their problems have been resolved quite satisfactorily.

I can’t say any more, because neither RK nor WW responded to the banks’ requests for permission to speak to me about their cases. Without such permission the banks, quite properly, cannot break rules of client confidentiality to give me details.

After RK and WW had ignored the banks’ requests for some weeks, I wrote to each of them myself, in RK’s case even enclosing an stamp- addressed envelope and a typed letter. All she had to do was sign it before sending it back to the bank.

Still no response. While I don’t suggest their problems were wholly of their own making, I cannot help feeling if this is their attitude to paperwork, it is perhaps not surprising they got into a mess.

So, RK and WW, for future reference please remember that the Lord helps those who help themselves — and this column likes to feel it takes a similar position.

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