Suggestions for honing the Reclaim bank charges article/reclaiming

Well hello there, its a pleasure to greet you and to be able to reply to one of your posts I have a couple for you Martin and thank you as a poster who tries to help as well as a claimant who asks questions for the oppertunity to express my ideas in one thread. Often excellent advice is buried in gleaming chunks in the depths of the forum and it can be daunting to face pages pages to look through. This is a wonderful oppertunity to help people who visit the site at the very first stage when they download the letters and before they enter the forum.

My own letters will be much more militant in manner as I try not to show fear, they can smell it. I also have an inherent streak of devilish cheek that will probably get me into serious trouble one day. I adapt your excellent templates to suit my needs and thank you for the kick-start provided by them. However my suggestions here are genuine additions, not adaptions or further advice and I genuinly hope they help someone who is nervous about this process.

Writing to the bank initially to request 6 years details I suggest the following addition to the template:

I am advised it may be practice for some financial institutions to store older records on microfiche and the Information Commissioner has deemed microfiche to be a relevant filing system under the the Data Protection Act. As such, any of my data stored in such a manner must therefore be represented on paper in a fully legible and comprehensible form in accordance with my entitlement to this request under the act.

This makes people aware this is a common problem but easily overcome.

2nd letter to request full refund, both versions (with or without interest):

I would suggest deletion of the phrase that reads 'of going into unauthorised overdraft' and to end that sentence at the name of the bank. This further hones the letter to one that anyone at all can use as it is or adapt with an addition regarding their own circumstances. Left as it is I feel it may be misleading to the bank and indicate accidentally that you are only disputing an overdraft you may not have or only overdraft charges despite the remainder of the letter to the contrary. Perhaps this interpretation by the bank would compromise your claim at court stage ? I dont know.

3rd letter to advise of possible court action.

On checking both letters I see they are identical and suggest removing one from the site to eliminate duplication and avoid confusion.

Further in light of banks using solicitors and their further requests for a list of charges at court stage I would suggest an addition after the last line regarding court proceedingss to read 'Should you wish to defend this action in court I require full contact details of your chosen representative and will forward these details for their retention and perusal in advance.'

Their late action in making such requests can be a jolt to claimants, wavering resolve and I believe it would be best to pre-empt this action giving them this 14 days to provide to the information. It would further be an indication to someone downloading the template for the first time that this is a common problem but easily remedied, so providing reassurance.

With regard to the site I think it may be worthwile to mention somewhere near the start that as at present the banks are under investigation at present by four different regulatory bodies in respect of their treatment of people who reclaim bank charges and may face prosection for same.

Source: http://news.independent.co.uk/business/news/article2323398.ece - dated 3rd March 2007.

This would reassure further anyone who is nervous about even thinking about starting this process.

Thank you once again for this oppertunity and for this site, keep up the good work

Hmm ...no more posts... I suddenly feel like I just told grandma how to suck eggs

/sorry Martin

hey Martin

I've noticed that alot of people are unsure of their own particular banks charges (me for one) as they all seem to have their own language and the way they clump them together, this together with the increases/decreases of the charges and different service charges for different types of account over the past six years makes it virtually impossible to decifer in some cases.

I think maybe a thread which just contains this kind of information could be of great help for those starting the process (maybe a sub-board on each bank thread)

MOST of the information IS available already on the site but there are an awful lot of posts per individual bank threads.

Sorry I know this isn't directly related to the article or templates but i thought it was worth a suggestion

Keep up the GREAT work

nel

I entered all my charges into a spread sheet so I have all of these in printable and emailable format. It took me ages to figure it but I created a formula to calculate the statutory interest. The caculations it made were only slightly different to the online calcualtor. The reason I didn't use the online calculator because it looked to me that I could print it out the data but I couldn't store it. Perhaps this could be looked at or I'd be happy to share my spreadsheet for use by others. perhaps someone could double check the accuracy of the calculations. The only thing is that it calculates the statutory intersest on the day you enter the data not on the day you end up filing a claim so you're under calculating the interest but I figured I'd be slightly generous to my bank since they'd been so unhelpful to me (two wrongs don't make a right);)