Do you have an endowment policy that you hope will eventually pay off your mortgage? If you do there is a very good chance that it might not be sufficient to repay your mortgage at the end of its natural term. If you have been reading the financial press you may already know this.

And if you have recently received a Red Letter from your endowment mortgage lender then you will already certainly know! So what do you do now? You must act promptly to ensure you can meet the potential shortfall when your endowment matures.

That's the really bad news, but the good news is that it is not too late to do something major about it, but you need to act quickly.

You may be unhappy with the way your policy was sold to you in the first place, and you would be in good company if you were, as hundreds of thousands of people have been and are taking steps against their endowment company. If this applies to you too, you do have a right to make a complaint, providing that you do something about it and complain within three years of receiving your first Red Letter. If you don't complain within that time, then your complaint may be rejected out of hand, no matter how justified your case may be, hence the urgency.

So who should you complain to? In Great Britain you need to complain to the company or person (perhaps a financial advisor) who sold you the policy in the first place and this may well be different from the company that actually issued the endowment policy. Explain your situation and tell them that you wish to make a formal complaint. They should then give you an official complaints procedure that you should follow.

In Britain you can also discuss the matter with the Citizen's Advice Bureau and you can visit their website at www.citizensadvice.org.uk or you can try the Financial Services Authority, their web site is www.fas.gov.uk/consumer.

Unlike the Citizen's Advice Bureau the FSA cannot give you one-to-one personal advice, but as the official regulator of all financial services companies within the United Kingdom, they will provide you with detailed fact sheets explaining how to tackle the problem, and a great deal of other information too.

If you reside outside the United Kingdom and suspect you have the same problem, the first thing you must do is to check if the endowment policy you have will be sufficient to cover your mortgage when it matures. If you find that it isn't, then make sure that you do something about it now before it is too late, and thus ensure that you don't have a serious problem somewhere further down the line.

David Carter