If you were self employed when you took out PPI then you may be due compensation. Many banks and lenders were keen to sell payment protection insurance to those who took out loans, mortgages and credit cards. Many who took out PPI were self employed. If you check the fine print, you may find that under certain circumstances, your policy doesn't actually cover you.

If you are wondering what PPI is then firstly it stands for payment protection insurance. Its purpose is to protect borrowers in the event of accident, sickness and unemployment. This is fine in practice although the reality is that when many people go to make a claim on their policy, they find that they are not in fact covered because of some exclusion clause that prevents them from making a claim.

If you are not in full time employment and you've been paying hundreds into this insurance policy per year, it may be a wise move to claim compensation and get your money back. Once you add interest on top, which you can also claim, you could be looking at thousands of pounds back.

Let us take an example. If you have been paying £50 per month into this type of insurance policy over the course of five years, which is the usual length of a loan, then you would have paid a total of £3000 into this policy by the end of the loan. Adding interest on top of this can often increase the size of a claim by as much as 25% - in fact in some cases it has doubled the size of the claim!

What you need to do first is to check your loan agreement. Does it say payment protection insurance on it or anything similar to that? You must check that you did actually take it out first and this information can usually be found on the loan agreement. If unsure then you could always contact your lender. They are obliged to release any information they hold about you.

Now here's the tricky part – drafting a carefully worded complaint to the financial institution that sold you the policy. Do ensure that you document your personal circumstances when you took out the policy and the exact reasons why you feel the policy was incorrectly sold to you. It's also helpful here to be aware of the Misrepresentation Act because if the lender was in breach of this it could strengthen your claim. Another piece of legislation is the statute of limitations – you need to make sure that you are claiming within the necessary time constraints.

If unsure, or you simply don't have the time, you could find a claims company to handle your claim for you. Choose one that has experience with PPI claims, that is regulated by the Ministry of Justice and that doesn't charge any upfront fees. It may take the complexity and the frustration out of the whole process for you, as not all of us enjoy having to compose legal letters of claim and enter into correspondence with the very people who have mistreated us in the first place.