sherbert wrote on Feb 3
rd, 2010 at 4:32pm:
Be very careful if you go down the Abbey route. Nearly every week in the 'Ask Jessica' column in the Saturday and Sunday Telegraph there is a complaint about this outfit.
It would only be for the credit card if I did go to Abbey and not for anything else. Also although Nationwide brought in a 1% foreign exchange rate levy for overseas card outside Western Europe they still don't charge a flat rate minimum card fee for withdrawing cash overseas, indeed they don't impose fee for taking cash out of a machine. Some other financial institutions charge up to a £3 minimum fee for taking cash out of a machine abroad and most of them now charge at least £1.50 per withdrawal. And I would have a nasty suspicion that Banco Santander (as they are actually now known) might still have a flat minimum fee for cash machine withdrawals, even though there is no foreign exchange rate levy on the Zero card.
Although I never cared for Adam Crozier or Alan Leyton I am much happier about Post Ofice Homephone (and especially only a 14 day minimum term before you can switch away fee free for a new customer) than I was latterly about yourcalls.net or indeed about the idea of going back to BT on a one year minimum term. So I might consider the Post Office credit card. But again although its foreign exchange rate levy free I wonder if it imposes charges and a minimum charge for making cash machine withdrawals?
But I have just discovered their overdraft rate on an authorised overdraft on a current account with them is now a disgraceful 18.9%, as bad as any clearing bank,
whereas two years ago it was 7% as one might expect from an organisation run in the interest of members[/b]. So how do they now pay no more than 2% on any instant access interest savings product and charge 18.9% for an overdraft. Before they paid 6% interest and lent it to the members at 7%. Yet they have never written to me to tell me of these further increases in rates with them. They did tell me when they had a comparatively modest interest rate increase from 7% to 9.5% or something. But they never told me about all the other increases.
Where is all this profit from lending going. Is it going in to a slush fund for the Chairman's new yacht or what exactly. How come the OFT and the Competition Commission are not investigating these quite disgraceful rates for lending money by the banks and building societies while they pay damn all to savers!