I fought the bank and I won …
When we emigrated we had a good look around for a bank that would suit our needs. We realised that Australian banks charge like wounded bulls, but what can you do – you need to put your money debt somewhere. All the banks seemed pretty similar to us, similar charges in each of ‘em so in the end we went with NAB because they’d just won Bank of the Year in Money magazine and because they had a village branch in nearby Berry.
Pretty much from the outset we started realising that NAB probably weren’t much cop but once you’ve got your direct debits and incoming payments all sorted it’s a real pain to change, so we stuck with ‘em. Over here pretty much all bank accounts come with a cheque and a savings account and usually a third separate credit card account. So when you go into a shop and use your card they always say, “Cheque, Savings or Credit” and press the appropriate button. Obviously most people keep any spare cash they have in their savings account in the hope that it’ll attract a buck or two of interest while it’s in there, so it’s the most common account used in a shop with EFTPOS. That’s all fine and dandy, but with our NAB accounts, we couldn’t use the savings account in shops – only the cheque. So when we went shopping we had to get online and transfer funds from the savings account to the cheque account. And you know what it’s like – you often forget to do things and so we were always finding ourselves in shops with baskets of food and no way of paying for them.
NAB also have the most woeful insecure on-line security. While most banks use various enigma machine style cyphers to encrypt your data entry, NAB have boxes for username and password that you just type in. I’m a member of web forums for desktop wallpapers that utilise more advanced security. Anyone that has a keylogger on their PC (and as a PC fixer I can tell you that’s probably a pretty high number) will have their account completely compromised.
Then there’s the way NAB charge. Now like I mentioned I realise that all Australian banks charge you for farting, but NAB have taken this to dizzy new heights. When we go overdrawn, even if it’s for five minutes, we’re charged $35 per day. This is on top of NAB’s charges which include a $4 monthly service fee, $0.50c if you use a non-NAB ATM machine, the $3.00 charge if you withdraw money at your branch (!!) and the $5.30 for a periodical payment to another bank. Now the thing about this system is that there’s no leniency shown whatsoever – you go overdrawn you pay. The problem is that we’re broke and we spend a lot of time trying to keep just the right amount of money in our account to cover our out-goings. And then NAB go and stick $7 of charges on our account, we go overdrawn and they charge us $35 a day until we get it back in credit. This has happened regularly since we got the account.
Anyway – we’re broker than usual at the moment and so we weren’t very happy when NAB did one of their specials on us – taking account charges out of our account, pushing us overdrawn and then charging us $35 for the honour. So we found ourselves go from being $15 in credit, to $115 overdrawn in the blink of an eye. I was furious, so was Liz. She’d tried getting through to someone on the phone with the telephone banking without success and phoned me up very pissed off. I told her since I was near Berry, I’d call in at the NAB and deal with it personally.
I asked the lady at the counter if I could speak to someone about my account’s charges. In the background the branch manager Lyndall was tapping away at a computer, I pointed to her and said, “Lyndall will do.” So she wanders over and speaks to her, comes back to the window and says that’s fine she won’t be a minute. Now, since this was a private discussion I’d assumed that they’d take me through to the talky-talky room – but no, she appears at a window at the end of the counter. Lovely. Okay I think – if you’re happy for all the customers to hear this, so be it.
So anyway – I explain to Lyndall what’s happened, I tell her that I’m sick and tired of the bank robbing us blind. I tell her that we’ve already had a three month mortgage break since we’re so broke and we could *really* do without NAB hammering us for $35 in overdrawn fees every time *they* push us into the red. I explain how it’s usually bank charges that push us overdrawn, not poor account handling on our part. I tell her that NAB make the taxman look like a charity. I also tell her that we’d tried to arrange a meagre $100 overdraft facility in order to keep a cap on these crazy fees and that after a two hour grilling by their loans department we were turned down. And lo and behold, she decides to take pity on me. We go through the statement and pick out the last set of fees and she says she’ll reverse them, thus putting our account back up to $15 in credit, from $120 overdrawn. Now I know she did me a favour, but she has this saintly air about her like I’m supposed to doff my cap and “Yes maam” her because she’s putting back money that was taken under the most dubious of means in the first place.
As you can probably understand we’d been looking around for a new financial institution in which to put our money debt. However when we looked at the fees and charges documents they all said the same, that we’d get charged for everything. So then we went to see Westpac with whom we have our mortgage. When we set up the mortgage (they were the only bank that would touch us) we had to set-up a cheque account from which our mortgage payments would be drawn each month. And all we’ve used that account for, in the three years we’ve had it, is to deposit our mortgage payment into. So imagine our surprise when we discovered that this account attracted no charges. No charges for using ATMs, for desposting money, for writing cheques, for farting. And then we found out that Westpac didn’t charge you for going overdrawn as long as you sorted it by 6pm. So we’ve begun moving everything over from NAB to Westpac and as soon as we’re sure all the incoming payments are going to the right account I will gleefully close our NAB account. Wankers.
