Should I ditch A&L Premier Direct Current Account?

bigpat

Hi,

Nearly 2 years ago I opened this account because of the 0% intorductory offer and the fact that a friend and I both got £25 when I referred her.

I haven't mananegd to clear my O/D yet, though it's down from £2000 to £500 but now A&L are going to charge 50p per day each day I'm overdrawn, rather than the %rate they charged before. They will cap it at £5 a month but that's still more than I pay in interest now.

So: should I ditch A&L? If so, who would you recommmend? My position is that I get paid about £1500 a month, of which I immediately transfer £1200 to another account to cover direct debits. The remining £300 plus the £500 o/d is what we live on and I usually go O/D for about 3 weeks of every month.

Thanks for any suggestions.

Stephen_Leak

If you pay in more than £1000 a month, the Abbey 8% one is the current Best Buy. See Martin's article on the main site.

BenL

Yeah ditch away, hopefully they will get the message that the new fees are not going down well.

I'm moving to Norwich and Peterborough BS current account as abbey made a switching mess. NP seem great so far.

Ben

bigpat

Thanks,

I know Martin has recommended the Abbey 8% as the best account if you're in credit, but does it still stack up if you're o/d over half of the time?

Actually I have an old Abbey current account anyway, which I never closed when I opened the A&L account. Nothing much goes in except for child benefit which we try and keep separate to save for Christmas.

Will Abbey let me transfer to the 8% account e.g. close one account and open another. If so I could easily switch my salary back in and still manually transfer my £1200 to my direct debit account.


PS. How do you thank people? I'm sure there must be an icon somewhere but I'm not a frequent poster.
And is it the number of posts that turns you from a newbie into a super duper singing and dancing diamond encrusted moneysaver?


Duh: Spotted the Thanks button now. It was right there all along. What am I like?

noh

bigpat wrote: »

Hi,

Nearly 2 years ago I opened this account because of the 0% intorductory offer and the fact that a friend and I both got £25 when I referred her.

I haven't mananegd to clear my O/D yet, though it's down from £2000 to £500 but now A&L are going to charge 50p per day each day I'm overdrawn, rather than the %rate they charged before. They will cap it at £5 a month but that's still more than I pay in interest now.

So: should I ditch A&L? If so, who would you recommmend? My position is that I get paid about £1500 a month, of which I immediately transfer £1200 to another account to cover direct debits. The remining £300 plus the £500 o/d is what we live on and I usually go O/D for about 3 weeks of every month.

Thanks for any suggestions.

If you still have an overdraft limit of £2000 why not put say £1200 of it into an A+L Direct saver account earning 6.3% gross approx this will give you £5 a month net interest cancelling out the £5 fee so effectively an interest free overdraft?

Nigel

sloughflint

noh wrote: »

If you still have an overdraft limit of £2000 why not put say £1200 of it into an A+L Direct saver account earning 6.3% gross approx this will give you £5 a month net interest cancelling out the £5 fee so effectively an interest free overdraft?

Nigel

Now that's what I call clever money-saving!

bigpat

Thanks, but I no longer have a £2000 limit. I reduced it gradually as I paid it off because - and it pains me to say this - my OH has this habit of running smack bang up against limits. We had extended this limit gradually over three years and every time it wasn't enough, so we'd extend it a bit more. I think the penny finally dropped for her when Abbey, who we were with at the time, declined our request to extend it to £2200 because our salaries weren't high enough.

In hindsight I think this was a blessing in disguise, though things were TOUGH for a while. Money is about the only thing we row about and that has eased off a helluva lot in the past year or so.

I love her to bits but I'm very wary of a £2k limit again.