NatWest/Barclays premier accounts

FIRSTTIMER

Does anyone have these accounts - what happens if you don’t fund account with the full £75k or have a drop in income - do they close the account?

I quite like the £1k fee free overdraft on barclaysbbut don’t think I could fund it with a £75k salary but maybe £60k ish

Flobberchops

There are many reasons why a person on a £75k salary may not have all of that going through an account (the £75k figure is gross, not net), so ultimately it's a matter of personal integrity when declaring your eligibility.



If you initially qualify but later reduce your salary, retire etc, in my experience they're in no hurry to change your account. To put that in context, if you make your Premier account joint, your spouse automatically qualifies as a Premier customer, even if they have zero income. The £75k income figure is just a line drawn in the sand; the bigger picture is that Barclays Premier want to deal with clients who have wealth to invest, larger properties to mortgage and insure, are low-risk borrowers for larger loans, etc. Simply having a high cash turnover doesn't in itself demonstrate much.

colsten

With £60K-ish going into your current account each year, couldn't you provide your own overdraft facility? I.e. always leave at least, say, £2K in your account? Choose a free, interest-paying, current account, and instead of paying account charges, the bank will pay you a modest amount of interest. That would be the MSE-way of managing your cashflow requirements.

Flobberchops

Can't speak for the Natwest premier account but the Barclays one is fee free, not packaged, etc.

Shakin_Steve

A couple of questions:
Why, if you can put £60K into a bank account pa, would you be in need of a £1K overdraft?
Do you have other bank accounts? If not put £6K into two Tesco accounts and earn 3% on it. £180 pa should more than cover any overdraft fee, should you occasionally dip into the red.

Marchitiello

As I understand the requirement is Gross Income not !!!8220;account turnover!!!8221; . I do enjoy the few perks that comes free from Barclays Premier, the special mortgage rates, high ATM withdrawal limits which you can does from your mobile banking ( I once set it to withdraw £1800 as I needed some cash urgently to pay some builders) and the fairly large fee free overdraft.

gingercordial

Natwest will eventually notice and downgrade it to a normal account (not close it). I don't know what that would do to the overdraft status. They downgraded mine, after having made it a Premier account unprompted but later on they raised the criteria and I no longer qualified. I wasn't bothered either way as the extras weren't of any interest to me.

I recently opened a Barclays Premier account as with my (correctly declared) salary I qualified for one and there was no option to decline and choose a normal one. However as I am not routing my salary through it, and won't be crediting as much as they require, I expect they will also notice and downgrade it in due course. I am enjoying the free coffees etc in the meantime though!