I read with interest the your article (Saturday 7 May, Your Money) on the problems with shortfalls on endowment mortgages. In particular the advice given by Anna Bowes, Patrick Connolly and Clive Scott-Hopkins about obtaining all the relevant information from the insurance company is essential.

Unfortunately many endowment mortgage policy holders are not sure how to go about obtaining the correct information or may not fully understand the information from the insurer when it arrives. Terminology is also often a problem for many people.

I know from experience how difficult it can be to obtain the information having carried out the exercise for my endowment mortgage policy, writing four letters between June and October 2004 and making three telephone calls since. My fourth letter is still unanswered.

Having received most of the information I prepared a spreadsheet to work out the various options and was horrified with the results. I might as well surrender the policy, pay off some of the endowment mortgage and invest the premiums in a cash ISA.

I came to the conclusion that there must be many people in a similar predicament so early this year I asked a leading firm of actuaries to produce an internet based program to help people obtain the relevant information.

The program is not just for endowments attached to a mortgage. People take out endowment policies for many reasons. The link to mortgages is probably the largest proportion, but others are taken out to secure guarantees, for children, to provide school fees in the future, to help with University costs, to buy them a car and many other reasons.

The program produces the letter to the insurance company asking for the necessary information, the reminder letter, the letter to the compliance officer and if still no satisfactory answers, the letter to the Financial Ombudsman Service.

Once the information is obtained it is tapped into the input page of the Policy Calculator. Various calculations are made and the calculator and prints out all the results. The customer then has access to a Personal Calculator to enable him or her to play with the results and try different investment strategies. All of this is done in a secure program.