Selling shares, length of time to get proceeds warning.

Marcusp

I had some shares from a company that demutualised and were held by Crapita.

Last Wed 5th I decided to sell them, so went to Crapita's website and signed into my account.

After numerous attemps to sell them online, site kept timing out, I decided to call them.

I thought, an 0845 number can't take all that long what's a £1 or £2 to get £1,000's.

Yeh right. They sure know how to spin out a phone call.
Everything repeated twice.

Eventually get the shares sold, then told they will send a cheque out on Monday. They don't do bank transfers, they will lose out on the interest they make from my money sitting in their bank account. OK I made that up.

Cheque eventually arrives today, just in time for me to go to the bank to pay it in.

Now I know why I hate going to the bank on a Saturday, queues out the door, all waiting to use the internal cash machines.

So I bypass these while the guard at the door was distracted because someone wanted to go inside to withdraw money at the counter that was less than what they could get from an ATM.

I get inside to the counter where surprisingly there was only one customer in front of me and 5 tellers twiddling their thumbs while customers tried to get money from them.

I present my cheque and say I want it paid into my Vantage current account.

Of course the amount on the cheque was more than the teller could handle so he had to run into the back to get permission and probably get someone out to advise me on how I should invest my £10,000s.

He returns and says that I would be better putting my money into my savings account.

I say at 2% when I can get nearly 3% in my Vantage account.

But you don't get that if you have more than £5,000.

Never heard of internet banking? that money will be out of there into my and my wife's ISA 2 minutes after I get home.

No it won't, he smirks, you can't get the cash until Friday.

And he did confirm, at least in his opinion, that Crapita pay out the proceeds in this manner because it costs them the least and that yes, they do get interest on the money until the cheque clears.

And they charged me over £100 for selling the shares.

And I do know now that I could probably have sold them cheaper and got the money quicker.

The point of this diatrade, 10 days to get my money after selling my shares.

Linton

3 days of the 10 arose from the settlement period for shares. When you sell/buy shares the actual transaction takes place 3 days (or more if both sides agree) later. It's like exchange of contract and completion when you buy/sell a house.

Thrugelmir

Lloyds has the deposit point facility. Never ever had to queue.

JoeCrystal

Thrugelmir wrote: »

Lloyds has the deposit point facility. Never ever had to queue.

And Halifax as well. Wonderful machine. Just feed in your cheque, even big one like dividend cheques into the machine and get small print out with photocopy of cheque and the amount. No humans involved. :j

Cheers,
Joe

jimjames

Thrugelmir wrote: »

Lloyds has the deposit point facility. Never ever had to queue.

Unfortunately even without the queues the cheque won't clear any faster

It's one downside of settlement by cheque but it is by no means unique - it was exactly the same when selling some IT shares recently directly with the trust manager and actually had a 5 day settlement period.