Abbey Current Account - warning - now corrected!

fwor

<please see correction in second post>

The Abbey Current Account which pays 8% for all balances up to £2500 for the first year looks to be a good deal but just to make you all aware:

If the Abbey representative I just spoke to is correct (and I've no reason to suppose she isn't), the 8% ceases to be applied as soon as the account goes over £2500, and from then a lower rate (2.5% IIRC) is applied ~to the whole balance~!

So if like me you originally assumed that you would still get 8% on the first £2500, and a lower rate on everything above - you'd be wrong!

Not that this makes it a bad account - it just means that you'll need to manage it a bit more carefully to keep a bit of "headroom"...

BTW - if anyone knows differently and can say that the rep I spoke to was wrong, please speak up! I tried to check the "Legal Details" on the Abbey website, but sadly it doesn't display properly in Firefox.

MarkyMarkD

The Abbey staff member you spoke to is a muppet.

Like with all of these very high rate current accounts, any balance over the limit attracts the lower rate on the amount beyond the limit.

So your original assumption was right.

Bernard_Coleslaw

Or go for the Coventry BS's First current account, which pays the high rate on everything up to £250,000

fwor

Thanks MarkyMarkD. It seemed to be a bit unfair that they would implement it as the Abbey rep described, and just goes to show how ill-informed some of the Customer Service depts are.

While I was speaking to her I did at least ask her to complain to their Technical people about the problems with Firefox and their website, though I won't hold my breath waiting for it to be fixed...

Milarky

That sounds unlikely to me perhaps they've conflated this information?:

Get a fantastic 8% AER on balances up to £2500
When you open an account and transfer to us using the Account transfer service we will pay you 8% AER on balances up to £2,500 for the first 12 months whether you choose our Preferred in-credit Rate or Preferred Overdraft Rate option.

If you choose our Preferred Overdraft Rate option you will receive a typical overdraft rate of only10.9% EAR (variable) and an in-credit rate of 0.1% AER.

It appears to get 8% (and not 0.1%) you must transfer your accounts... but it is strangely worded and I could be wrong!

On the firefox thingy, use IE Tab - it fixes all your incompatible site problems - like Abbey's:



With this installed, whenever you get to a site that doesn't look as if it 's loaded properly in Firefox just right-click on your mouse and select 'open in IE tab' OR left-click the button in the toolbar shown above. To set Firefox to open a particular web-page automatically in IE tab, just right-click the same button and a box with a list of IE-tab defaulted sites appears with your current website/page at the foot. Then just click 'add'. If you use the 'home page' of a site then all pages from that site will continue to display in IE tab [Note this relies on having a version of Internet Explorer also running, but simply 'renders' the page as it would appear in Explorer within a Firefox tab. If you are looking for sites visited in cache later, therefore, those particular IE-tabbed pages will be held in the Explorer's cache, and NOT in Firefox's]

MarkyMarkD

Wow, Milarky. That's the best Firefox tip ever.

I have a number of sites which won't work in Firefox and it's a real pain to open up IE especially for them.

Thanks!