Nice People Thread No. 14, all Nice and Proper

GDB2222

hjd wrote: »

Closing bank accounts, even those with no money in them, is not easy. Even if you opened them online, you can't close them online. Had to throw a wobbly in Barclays once as they wanted me to make an appointment to close accounts - only so they could try and sell me something else. Lloyds were better but you still have to go into a branch.

I need to close one account that I don't use, but which has some money in. I just spoke to them. They want a short letter and they will send me a cheque for the balance in the post. How much more painless could that be?

michaels

I need to do a lot of savings sorting out. Paying tax bill has made a space in the 1-2-3s but at the same time 6 savings accounts and he isa have cut rates costing about £1500 over the year so I need to work out if they are still competitive or if there are better options - lots of people seem to swear by opening as many as possible of the much higher paying regular savers (NW 5%, HSBC 6% etc) Do have a few of these, one of which has now had its 12m and so needs dealing with. On the ISA not only have they cut the rate but also increased the amount needed by 6k to get the top rate - tricky when I have already paid a nominal amount into an hsbc isa this year to get a tenner a month bonus for 12 months which I obiovusly don't want to close....Not sure it is worth keeping an isa at all at the moment with rates so low and the higher annual max deposit limits and the tax free savings zone.

PN do you have any plans to earn enough that the interest tax free savings zone on top of the personal allowance would not be suffiecient to keep your savings interest tax free? If not you are probably best of putting the ia funds into a better paying standard sacvings/current account.

michaels

GDB2222 wrote: »

I need to close one account that I don't use, but which has some money in. I just spoke to them. They want a short letter and they will send me a cheque for the balance in the post. How much more painless could that be?

Closing it there and then and transferring the balance to another account of your choice would defintely have been more painless.

GDB2222

michaels wrote: »

Closing it there and then and transferring the balance to another account of your choice would defintely have been more painless.

They won't accept telephone instructions to do that - quite rightly in my view.

PasturesNew

GDB2222 wrote: »

I need to close one account that I don't use, but which has some money in. I just spoke to them. They want a short letter and they will send me a cheque for the balance in the post. How much more painless could that be?

I HATE posting things. I've no printer and my handwriting's a bit grim as I've not really ever had to write anything since I was about 16. I did take one 3-hour written A level when I was ~35 and at the time my fear wasn't knowing the stuff, it was "oh hell, can I really WRITE for 3 hours!" It makes my fingers hurt

zagubov

PasturesNew wrote: »

I see the search function here is brokeded

connection to mse-forums-db.hosted-at.thebunker.net:3312 failed (errno=111, msg=Connection refused)

It was broken yesterday for a while then back to normal.

Spirit_2

Not tried to close any accounts, but have tried moving large sums. Not too much trouble paying in, but trying to transfer elsewhere is very annoying.Maximum daily transfer online is £25000. Going in to the bank to do it is ok if you pay for a chaps payment at a cost of £30.

transfer £25,000 a day for as long as it takes.

michaels

PasturesNew wrote: »

I suspect I won't be able to earn anywhere near the personal allowance, nor earn that much on savings interest (that I only spotted exists this week). £1000/year isn't it. Does that include ISAs?

To earn £1000, in, say, a 2% account, one'd need £50k in savings.

Why is everything so complex? No need for it. If banks'd simply had a plain and simple ISA savings account that you used like any other account, with a nice passbook .... it'd be so much simpler.

I probably plan to: find the easiest/high paying savings account and open one of those. Toss some money at Premium Bonds just because ... "it could be me". At least in there I don't have to f4nny about with all the paperwork, statements, faffing around all the time.

Exactly - the rates are generally a bit lower on ISAs as they think they can get away with it as people are avoiding the tax, but if you aren't paying tax anyway then you are better off just getting the higher rate from a bog standard savings account.

Running_On_Empty

PN, ISAs are tax free.

GDB2222

PasturesNew wrote: »

I HATE posting things. I've no printer and my handwriting's a bit grim as I've not really ever had to write anything since I was about 16. I did take one 3-hour written A level when I was ~35 and at the time my fear wasn't knowing the stuff, it was "oh hell, can I really WRITE for 3 hours!" It makes my fingers hurt

Is there a business opportunity there? Are there lots of people without printers who need to send the occasional letter?