Tuesday, August 28, 2007

share the frustration

When I was born I was lucky enough to be given some shares by my Grandfather. They have sat around for 30 years, kept secret from my financially disastrous first husband, and regularly paid out pitiful dividends of about £79 a year.

Now that we are buying our family home we decided to go 'all in' and cash in our savings to try and reduce the mortgage. 'Don't worry,' I said to Nick, 'We can sell my shares to pay for the solicitors fees, removal men and stamp duty'.

At this point we had 6 weeks to liquidise the cash. Plenty of time I thought.

The first week was swallowed by trying to locate the whereabouts of the share certificates, and learn how to go about selling on the stock market - a world totally alien to me.

The second week had me on the phone to Computershare.com trying to sell. I was told: 'We can't sell these shares for you because they are registered in your name but at your accountants address - your sale would fail under money laundering laws because it is for more than £9000. We will send you a form to fill in to change the address.'

The third week passed as I filled in the forms and then returned them, was told I hadn't signed in the correct box, filled in and sent off more forms.

The forth week passed as their very slow system found it really difficult to type in my new address. It takes 5 days apparently, even though the woman could see all my details on the computer.

This week I have finally managed to sell one of my investment holdings (la-di-daa listen to me) but the other one still has my accountant's address, so they can't sell it. Even though the stock I have sold went through today, they won't send out the cheque until the 11th of sept, which means it won't arrive until the day we move.

I really don't know when I will receive the money from the other holding, which is annoying because that's the biggest amount.

So basically my advice is, if you are trying to sell shares allow at least 9 weeks of your life to affect the transaction, and try to keep your patience.

1 Comments:

Blogger The Author said...

Oh My Goodness..make sure they send the cheque in time for your move - or it will get 'lost in the post"...imagine that - it may take another 9 weeks to sort that out!!!! Good Luck with the move - if I lived nearer I would come and help!!!

6:08 PM  

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