1 late payment fair?

Janie4Now

danothy wrote: »

I don't want to get into whether they are reasonable either to be honest ... either way, my personal suspicions are that the fees are cynical in implementation (i.e. that than they can get away with it rather than to cover costs). I don't disagree with this but we are where we are......and there are challenges being made!



What if I could prove that my leisure time was taken up dealing with it? How would that be valued? What about the work the individual has to do to develop the equivalent methodology to deal with the other party's error that the lender would likely all ready have in place? In law your leisure time doesn't count. And to be fair, it is up to the wronged individual to make the bank aware of the problem and to be able to prove it. The lender may know there is a problem but they may not know the precise details of every error.

I wonder how it would fly if an individual said they would return a lender to their previous expected financial state after a late payment and rejected the standard charge model? Not well I speculate. The point is that the lender incurrs additional charges for accounts that pay late (in work time, not leisure!), as against those that do not. To make it easy, they use a standard charge. We may not like it but at least it applies to everyone.

These are the reasons that I suspect that the charges are cynically applied as disincentives to the consumer and to increase profit from a loan, rather than to their actual costs. If it were really about costs then surely the system would be differently implemented? Imagine if they charged you the full cost....flagging the account, producing the letter, posting it, calling you xx times to chase..... if a late payment charge is £12, then actually I'll live with that because the thought of coughing up for xx minutes of an employee's time is horrendous! And would be so easy to inflate....

And finally......there wouldn't be any charges if the payment was made on time.....