A&L Overdraw? Im an idiot

Scully's_Girl

To be honest, Ive never gone overdrawn before. I checked my account right now & saw I was £700 overdrawn. I immediately moved £2000 into the account from my A&L savings account. I had been charged two penalties of £25.00 for going over. I called A&L, & they were able to remove "50%" of the penalty, or £25.00, because the mistake wasnt their fault. However, I have issue with the penalty because
A) I have plenty of money in my savings account, with the same bank they could have grabbed it from
They didnt notify me. Would they have just kept charging me £25.00 per debit until I got my bill?
C) I think £25.00 is very excessive since Ive never done it before & its fairly automatic with them, so I bet it cost them nothing.

I was wrong here, & I admit this was my fault. Please dont think Im complaining because I made the mistake, not them, but do I have a leg to stand on? A&L reimbursed me one charge & said I have to write in for the other. I just wrote a letter Ill mail on the way home today. I really dont want my husband to realize I let this happen. Any suggestions?

bluekp

Basically you are well within your rights to try and claim these charges back - they have been deemed unlawful by the OFT.

There is a whole thread on this here:

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=158155&highlight=bank+charge

It should guide you towards the bankactiongroup who have templates for claiming back these charges on their website (you need to register on the website to get the template but it's all free).

Good luck claiming it back and let me know how you get on - I sent the same letter to them last week claiming mine back and I'm just waiting to hear the outcome!

grumbler

Scully's_Girl wrote:

To be honest, Ive never gone overdrawn before.

Accidents happen. Is it difficult/impossible to arrange agreed overdraft limit? If you had it you'd pay just about 10p per day for £700 overdraft ...

anticlaus105

Similar thing happened to me when I transfered some money out same day as moving it in from online saver. For some reason proccesed transfer out first.

Kicked off and got money back eventually. This was before OFT ruling so it should be even easier now. Don't give up.

Sillychuckie

A friend of mine was about to go overdrawn in his A&L premiere direct account and to cover it, A&L automatically moved some money from his online saver (issue 2) into the current account, and then called him to let him know.

Strange how they treat some cases differently to others.

schiff

sillychuckie - I wish they had done that for me many months ago; I had thousands in my Savings account and went overdrawn for one day to the tune of a few hundred in my current account.

It cost me a charge of £30 but I've written off about it this week, quoting the recent OFT pronouncement. See what they say. I'd be surprised if they didn't refund it - or at least half.

oldandhappy

When I was YoungandnotsoHappy....a couple of bank errors occurred resulting high charges to our account and I really had to fight to get the money back..We found a simple answer if you have a savings account with the same bank...as soon as our account goes below £20.00 an automatic transfer from savings to current happens:D ...no hiccups can happen again...as long as we have some savings of course....