Changing your Home Loan contract without your knowledge or authorization

Please be aware that Standard Bank changes their terms and condition on your Home Loan without informing you. They change the repayment options to suite them because they claim that if you do not respond to their letter then it will default to this option. This option, so they say, will make your term still 20 years if you put in extra money into your access bond facility. This obviously benefits them the most. The problem is, they apparently send me this letter...however, they send it to the wrong physical address. This, even though I have changed my address to the current one more than a year ago. Not only that, they ASSUME, you will get this (yeah right, with our postal system!). Then, if you don't respond within a short window your option defaults to suite them.

The reason this was not picked up was that Standard Bank very conveniently made these changes commensurate with the last repo rate change. So when my debit order was suddenly lower I assumed that it was because of the repo rate change.

But....this options which they conveniently changed behind my back without my authorization or knowledge will allow your monthly debit order to be recalculated based on the amount you put in extra. However, this did not happen at all...hence the reason I did not pick up on this contract change behind my back. So, after some 'investigations' they came back with a story that if the extra money you put in is lower than a 5% value then the debit order amount stays the same. I asked them to proof this to me on official correspondence which they couldn't.

In addition, for me to change back to the option I want (that is, a fixed monthly debit order amount and my term to reduce with the extra money I put in), I have to now suddenly agree to go back to the original contracted amount...which is R500 more than what I have been accustomed to the past few months. So, they force you to either pay more money because your term stays 20 years or you have to pay more money on a monthly basis to keep the option that suits you,

Be careful when thinking of going to Standard Bank for a Home Loan. They have yet to tell me how they can change a contract that WE agreed to without my knowledge. Which means they can decide on ANY change to your contract and simply implement this.