Should I ditch Santander 123 due to the fee increase? 21 September 2015 at 5:02PM in Martin's blogs & appearances & MoneySavingExpert in the news 26 replies 13K views

MSE_Eesha

This is the discussion to link on the back of Martin's blog. Please read the blog first, as this discussion follows it.

Read Martin's "Should I ditch Santander 123 due to the fee increase?" Blog.

Please click 'post reply' to discuss below.

Cornucopia

I'm getting 404 from that link.

Bay

Worked fine for me - perhaps try again later or try a different browser.

jamesd

There's more extensive discussion in the topic Santander 123 current account fees rising to £5 in January.

It's also worth considering the potentially cheap overdraft facility. Mine's at about 4% if I was to use it all continuously but the bigger win for me is the £1 daily rate that makes it cheaper than fixed fee plus interest rate I get elsewhere. This makes it relatively cheap for me to do short term investing funded by the overdraft facility. I recently made about £70 from short term P2P trading for a cost of £7 in overdraft charge and expect to be able to repeat this at least a few times a year. Definitely not for everyone, but handy for some.

MSE_Martin

For overdraft Nationwide's overdraft 0% for a year then 50p a day smashes it, hence why I don't consider it an overdraft option

Davlin

Yes it is probably better not to ditch 123 but such massive fee increases should be challenged. Is it not possible with joint action to make Santander sit up,take notice and reconsider ? As a wrinkly I don't have the expertise to organize a mass protest but surely somebody out there does. Perhaps one of Martin's colleagues could?

jamesd

MSE_Martin wrote: »

For overdraft Nationwide's overdraft 0% for a year then 50p a day smashes it, hence why I don't consider it an overdraft option

Thanks. Yes, it's not remotely close to the best overdraft deal.

Just a feature that I'll use profitably in addition to the already profitable for me cashback.

They have another advantage of a sort: they turn out to be no hassle for the sort of investment transactions I do that would cause FD to close my offset current account and change my offset interest only mortgage to non-offset if I was to do them there.

For the moment, for me, spending credit searches on credit card BTs is a better use than a fifth current account. Might change sometime. If I could borrow £500k+ I would... so many great opportunities out there with decent risk levels, at least for me.

tgroom57

I'm looking for somewhere to hold savings (5-10k) so I've read this carefully. I'll probably make half the £60 charge in cashback, and Santander 123 still looks to have the edge.

Your comparison table had me puzzled at first- I don't pay tax, and the numbers seemed lower than my calculations.

the2ems

Does anyone know if there is an exit fee for leaving Santander?

matty_art

Why doesn't this article take into account the other various current accounts that earn 3% or more e.g. TSB, BOS, Tesco? If you earn little to no cashback, all of these options are better than Santander and with a little swapping money around, you can save at least £11k in them. Use a couple of regular savers as well and Santander starts to look like only an option if you have well over £25k to save (as you'd need £10k in Santander to make it better than other accounts).

allybee13

I'd hate to have the bills of the people making £500+ a year from this account.

Using my average bills for calculations I'd make £66.50 and pay out £60.00 so I didn't bother changing my existing Santander current account as I pay my bills from Halifax and get £60 a year ... a profit of £53.50 against Santander's £6.50.

I had considered keeping my Halifax account and transferring council tax, gas/electricity and phone/broadband to Santander to get the best of both worlds but for £6.50 a year it's not worth the hassle.

Very disappointing move from Santander.