How much hastle will it be?

Milarky

mary,

Direct debits can be for variable amounts of course - eg BT phone bill, credit cards. Also, you may have received a 'bank credit' from billing organisations too - eg Egg card annual cashback payment. In fact the direct debit has to be capable of making payments to you since part of the 'guarantee' is that wrongly claimed amounts will be refunded.

The part about loss of interest is correct also - if you make two 'back-to-back' BACS payments 2[/sup]'] you lose on each leg, but with the direct debit to ING [and also to cahoot] the monies are 'credited' on the date of withdrawal even though they may in practice take two days to arrive - so you only lose interest on one leg.

However 'one-off' debits can't be made immediately - on the 'same' day - due presumably to the need for the 'originator' to notify your bank of an intention to collect. The least time would appear to be two days - but that might be something to do with the time it takes for payments to clear though BACS - and, for some reason, cahoot adds another two days to this. This is a bit of a pain but if you had a 'decent' bank account [or linked savings with direct transfers in-between] you could wait out the four days required.

I've noticed that with some credit cards direct debits they will take into account of any interim payments made towards the direct debit amount [eg statement for £100 - will collect full balance - but you pay £70 in advance so collects £30 instead] but they will stipulate a minimum of 4 or five clear working days before collection - or the debit will not be adjusted. If you think about it - they cannot change the amount at the last moment as your bank needs to be notified in advance still

ic

Just to add to the replies above, as well as paying in to the cahoot account via Direct Debit, you can also do a normal BACS transfer to the sort code and account number of the savings account. If you log into Cahoot, then go to the summary page of the savings account it will confirm the sort code and account number. This is handy for transferring from other accounts, such as Egg