We all know how difficult it is to accept the loss of the money we put into an investment. However, in some cases, it is more than just a run of bad luck: for every good piece of investment advice out there, there is a bad piece of advice that can take you down the wrong path, intentionally or not.
If your bank, building society, or another advisor was keen to provide advice that resulted in lost funds, then it can be important to rectify that problem rather than simply letting the money go. When you have been mis-sold an investment, you are being lied to, and the money you lost should not have been lost at all.
What are Mis-Sold Investments?
In simple terms, a mis-sold investment is any investment that was “sold” to a customer in an incorrect way, either through malicious fake pretenses or due to a lack of clarity and understanding of the customer’s needs.
In either case, a mis-sold investment was offered in a way that did not pursue the customer’s best interests and often results from poor financial advice or outright misleading statements about their finances.
Mis-sold investment losses can be quite serious. While there is always some risk with investments, losses during normal investing happen due to changes in the market – things that can theoretically be predicted or avoided if you have enough knowledge of the parties and companies involved.
With mis-sold investments, the customer never gets a chance to know the full truth behind their investments. They might be paying money to a scam company or simply being told incorrect information about the markets, and that makes it impossible for them to invest correctly.
Recovering from Mis-Sold Investments
If you were mis-sold an investment opportunity, then recovering from it can be a daunting task. While some people will be tempted to just eat the costs and start all over again, you actually have some legal grounds to get your money paid back by the group that gave you the advice.
This is because it was not actually your fault that the investment was lost. If investments are seriously recommended by an authority on the subject under false pretenses, then the blame rests on them for not giving you an accurate or complete picture of the markets that they were recommending.
There are ways to recover your money, especially if you are down a considerable amount of your own funds. The more extreme the mis-sold advice was, the more reason you have to try and salvage your money because nobody should be sold advice that simply is not true – especially when it deals with their finances.
Step 1: Get an Expert Opinion
As we have said, mis-selling is a serious matter. Get a professional’s advice on what to do, and seek proper legal support for the entire process. Even if you only lost a relatively small amount of money, you want to have an expert backing you up, especially if the investment advisor tries to drag the process out.
Having an expert on hand also means that you can’t get sidetracked with legal information you might not understand or lost in a sea of terms that you are not familiar with. This can be a real problem for newbie investors who might not fully understand the legal processes behind reclaiming lost money.
Step 2: Don’t Back Down
The worst thing that you could do is just accept the fact that you lost a huge chunk of your money and that the process will be long and hard. Instead, focus on recovering as much of your funds as possible.
If you are not confident that you can get the money back, there are still a number of things you can try. Finding accessible legal help is a good way to get an understanding of whether or not you have the grounds (and means) to recover your money, all without having to really do anything yourself.
At the very least, you should talk to a professional to get an idea of how likely the recovery is. Giving up straight away means that you will never be presented with a chance to reclaim the money, but many of these situations provide the victim with opportunities to get paid some form of compensation.
Step 3: Take Things Slowly
You often have quite a lot of time to start making a claim over situations like this. While you should not wait literal years before making the claim, you can spend some time putting your case together and finding relevant documents or messages that include incorrect information.
If you are not sure how to do this, talk to a professional instead. They can go through relevant files to pick out details that hint at mis-sold investment advice or anything else that might be related to your unexpectedly lost money.
Slowing down is the easiest way to ensure that you actually get through the process comfortably and effectively, rather than speeding through and potentially missing the chance to actually make the best claim possible. If you never try reclaiming your money, you will never know if you actually could.
Is Claiming Back A Mis-Sold Investment a Good Idea?
There are very few reasons not to claim back the money you lost from a mis-sold investment. If you think you have a strong argument in favor of you being able to reclaim the money, then be sure to act on that advice, no matter how stressed it might make you at the moment.
If you have a chance of getting your money back, then it is a risk worth taking. Even if the investment advisors made a genuine mistake, it was still a mistake that they legally should not have made – they are supposed to have the knowledge and tools to provide accurate advice at all times.
You have every right to come back and try to get your money. Many people don’t realize that they would have quite a lot of support if this happened, especially if there were other people who had suffered the same problem and were looking for the same kind of compensation.