Are these charges correct?

rincewind209

Hi, first post so go gentle.
My bank, Santander have applied 3 x £25 charges for 3 transactions all on 9/7/12. The transactions were for £4.59, £1.80 and 90p. They were all at the same retailer (where I work). That morning I had checked my account balance online and it showed an available balance of more than the amount I spent. The transactions were applied to the account on 11./07/12 and at that point I was approx £15 over my overdraft limit. Had I done enough to check that it was ok to use my account, how accurate should the available balance be? Also, some of transactions put on the account were debit card ones 4 days old, is this usual?
Please advise as I would like to complain further after a fruitless phone call to Santander.

meer53

Debit card transactions rarely debit the day they are made, they usually debit a couple of days later. If you were £15 over your limit when they debited then you will incur charges. Something else must have debited your account between you making them and them debiting. It's up to you to keep track of what you're spending and whats debited and what hasn't.

If you've never had a charges refund before, call Santander to ask them if they will refund any of them for you.

jonesMUFCforever

On the day you made the transactions you say you had enough money - what other transaction happened to take you over?
It is very rare to get a debit card transaction debited the same day - they all take a few days.
Unfortunately it is your responsibility to monitor your spending.Sometimes small purchases are not earmarked.
If it is the first time it has happened you might want to try a phone call to see if they will waive them.

rincewind209

Yeah it was several small transactions about 10 in total, problem was a couple were 4 days old and I assumed they were through already.

Lansdowne

One more reason why it's much simpler to pay cash for small transactions, apart from the longer queues that the rest of us have to endure. If your £30 spending money was in cash, how easy would it be to spend more than you had?

jonesMUFCforever

The word ''ASSUME'' is your downfall here. Sorry unless you ask politely for a refund the charges are valid and will stand.

pmduk

Lansdowne wrote: »

One more reason why it's much simpler to pay cash for small transactions, apart from the longer queues that the rest of us have to endure.

Most times paying by chip and pin is as fast if not faster than paying by cash.

jonesMUFCforever

pmduk wrote: »

Most times paying by chip and pin is as fast if not faster than paying by cash.

It may be faster but in this case certainly more expensive!;)

Boromoor1

rincewind209 wrote: »

Hi, first post so go gentle.
My bank, Santander have applied 3 x £25 charges for 3 transactions all on 9/7/12. The transactions were for £4.59, £1.80 and 90p. They were all at the same retailer (where I work). That morning I had checked my account balance online and it showed an available balance of more than the amount I spent. The transactions were applied to the account on 11./07/12 and at that point I was approx £15 over my overdraft limit. Had I done enough to check that it was ok to use my account, how accurate should the available balance be? Also, some of transactions put on the account were debit card ones 4 days old, is this usual?
Please advise as I would like to complain further after a fruitless phone call to Santander.

While I can understand that banks have to charge some kind of penalty to deter misuse of an account, what annoys me is the fact that they can charge you more than the amount by which you would, or would have exceeded your overdraft. If a D/D payment would take you 10pence into an "unauthorised" overdraft, not only will they not pay the D/D but can then charge you £15 to £25 for the pleasure of receiving a standard letter telling you just how naughty you've been. Take a look on the Governments "e-petitions" website, there's quite a few people trying to get petitions signed to do something about it.
Still, it must give you a warm glow knowing that you've contributed £75.00 towards Santanders' CEO, Ana Botins bonus this year.

dalesrider

Boromoor1 wrote: »

While I can understand that banks have to charge some kind of penalty to deter misuse of an account, .

A fairer way would be for a single charge at the end of the day if your account is over limit. Which I think a few banks do.

E petitions are a joke and not worth the bandwidth used... They are simply something set upto make people think they listen to public opinion. Is it something like 100K sigs before they will even look at it...
Then we had the 2 million + road pricingone, to which they simply said they will do what they want anyway....

Gromitt

Yup, it's like "Thanks for the 2 million signatures, but what your requesting is impractical/infeasible (delete as appropriate), so will not be discussed further."