Could you please advise, what if anything, I could do to reclaim these charges.

sheba

THE RECLAIM CHARGES BOARD DOES NOT SEEM VERY WELL POPULATED SO AM TRYING MY LUCK HERE


Hi there, so the situation is my son of 20 who moved out into a house of trouser got into a little bit of a sticky situation with cash. He opened all his finances upto me and I was able to figure out what he owed out to various people and accounts, in total as of today £802.61. This I have transfered to a debt to me, (by paying everyone else, overdraft, personal debts to housemates etc,so he owes nothing to anyone else) but I can see exactly where this debt has come from. £279.25 he owes to me for tickets to future gigs and so although it is a debt I can not be too hard on him as he owes for concerts not happening till Sept, Oct x 2, Nov and December.
The bigger worry is that he has paid out £579 in bank charges since Jan 09, these were accrued thus:

8th Jan 09 (or thereabouts) £25.00,
8th Feb 09 (or thereabouts) £25.00,
8th Mar 09 (or thereabouts) £50.00,
8th Apr 09 (or thereabouts) £25.00,
8th May 09 (or thereabouts) £00.00,
8th Jun 09 (or thereabouts) £75.00,
8th Jul 09 (or thereabouts) £50.00,
8th Aug 09 (or thereabouts) £00.00,
8th Sept 09 (or thereabouts) £00.00,
8th Oct 09 (or thereabouts) £00.00,
8th Nov 09 (or thereabouts) £25.00,
8th Dec 09 (or thereabouts) £00.00,
8th Jan 10 (or thereabouts) £25.00,
8th Feb 10 (or thereabouts) £25.00,
8th Mar 10 (or thereabouts) £50.00,
8th Apr 10 (or thereabouts) £25.00,
8th May 10 (or thereabouts) £00.00,
8th June 10 (or thereabouts) £54.00,
8th July 10 (or thereabouts) £75.00,

and lastly due on 8th August (or thereabouts) £50.00,

I know this is stupidity on his behalf as I always told him better to borrow from Mum and Dad as we don't charge fees but as you can see (the fees really makes up the bulk of the debt he has and seems a little bit exploitative of a young man, who wanted to be seen to managing his own affairs and for the most part I think has done well, other than owing for future events and what he has wasted on fees.

He has never approached the bank to ask them to drop any of the fees, so my question to you is, could he claim any of the fees back? How would he go about that, what could he reasonably expect to ask for back. Hope you can help me out with advise as if he could get anything back it would be a great help to him in reducing the fairly small amount of debt he has, (and he could pay it back to me!!)

edit: FYI he banks with HSBC

Thanks again

Wee_Jo

Hi Sheba,

I am not sure if I am the best person to be answering, but hopefully someone else will be along soon. I have only got experience claiming back credit card charges and I think these are bank account charges. I know that the rules changed for bank charges after the court ruling but I don't have any other knowledge about it. Perhaps you could check out this article:

http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/reclaim/bank-charges

I am not sure if it is helpful or not, as I said, I don't have experience with it - but you could give it a try.

Good luck!

Jo

sheba

Thanks for that link Jo

Could anybody else express an opinion? I've never had need to claim so didn't really keep up on the news about it all, but know enough to know that the court ruling did not really fall the consumers way, so wonder whether just to appeal to the branch to get the impending charges dropped or whether it's worth trying to claim for the whole lot, and settle for any serious percentage offer- are they still actually reviewing cases? Or are they hiding behind the ruling. Also can I argue the hardship thing when to all intents and purposes he's not in any actual debt (other than to me and I think I could prove that as there are many instances of me transferring money into his account under the title 'loan', which I did to stop him incuring charges when I had second guessed him enough to know that he was likely to get some- pity he never opened up enough to me at that point we could have avoided all these charges!!) What to do? What would you do?

Thanks for any opinion -just trying to gauge whether it is pointless to put in a full claim and I would be better trying to get the most recent £50 wiped before they take it?

Thanks again

DarkConvict

In all likely hood the answer is no.

Reclaiming charges used to be a simple process until a few years ago, then the OFT case started. The OFT lost the reclaim case in Nov 2009 and failed to follow it up. To be honest it was probably just a show, and if the banks weren't already crippled they may have been allowed to carry on.

Anyways, my thoughts now over. Any charges over £12 on credit cards can be reclaimed as a high court case has seen this already - http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/reclaim/credit-card-charges

As to credit cards/loans etc, if it had PPI on it, it might be reclaimable - http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/reclaim/ppi-loan-insurance

As to bank charges, any hope that is left is in this guide - http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/reclaim/bank-charges

sheba

Thanks for that, I think we will try to get the latest charges wiped by appealling to the banks better nature(?) arguing that he is trying to learn how to budget and has paid them enough and only had the account for three months before he started incurring charges- see if we can recoup any losses that way. Other than that I think put it all down to costly expierience and send him this link so he can see the errors of slipping into the evil realm of the unauthorised overdraft

thanks again