Best bank accounts.

[Harry Bloomfield]

Why would you need one?

Just pointing out the limitations. the lack of CASS is the sticking point for me...

I'm looking for an alternative to my Nat West current account, which is pathetic. It's used for all the household payments, and DD's. It costs me £5 per month, but I get a little back from the DD payments. I like to keep £5K to £10K in it, which earns me nowt. Not a joint account, but in my name, but we keep it topped keep it up, via a fixed SO.

 

[Ivor Windybottom]

You're paying them £5 a month to lend them your £5-10k?!

You need a re-think.

LHV would pay you £187.50 - £375 a year to look after your money, instead of you paying Natwest £60.

I'd put up with a few missing bells and whistles, if none are critical.

Sadly for me a joint account is essential. We once had separate accounts, it was a right pain.

You can create what's effectively a standing order by telling your source bank to send a regular payment every month. Standing orders are pretty much redundant these days, a relic of a bygone era.

 

[Harry Bloomfield]

You're paying them £5 a month to lend them your £5-10k?!

You need a re-think.

Yes, I know - that's what I said, but I do gain a little to more than offset the charge, via the DD's.

LHV would pay you £187.50 - £375 a year to look after your money, instead of you paying Natwest £60.

Yes, I know, but as said, I want to try to avoid the aggravation of manual switching all the DD's. I might do it anyway.

 

[Ivor Windybottom]

Ahhh, just worked out what the CASS you referred to was! Current Account Switching Service.

We switched about 6 years ago. I deliberately chose not to use it, as I wanted to review everything myself to weed out any dead ones that may be hanging about. Plus I didn't trust a robot to not mess it all up. It really wasn't a big deal to transfer the ones we have. Although it depends how many subscriptions you have - we're bloody mean so have almost nothing. Some of what we do have are regular payments via the credit card (e.g. YouTube Premium), so unaffected anyway.

 

[Ivor Windybottom]

Our credit card pays cashback, we get £5-£10 a month from that. Everything that can goes onto that, it gets paid in full by DD every month.

 

[Harry Bloomfield]

Although it depends how many subscriptions you have - we're bloody mean so have almost nothing.

I'm so mean, I have none at all - but it doesn't stop 'em trying....

I used to have a Paypal account, and some game company managed somehow, to set up an annual subscription - I don't play games. I tried without success, to get Paypal's droid to recover the amount, failed, then got my bank to claw it back and stop any payments to Paypal, and stopped using it.

I use a bit of subscription software, which watches all my accounts, clears all obviously regular transactions, but flags up any new ones for closer inspection. That flagged up the games company transaction.

 

[Ivor Windybottom]

I live under a strict regime where she-who-must-be-obeyed ticks all her transactions off the credit card statement then gets me to tick off mine. Anything unidentified will be investigated.

I had the same happen with Paypal lots of years ago. I stopped using it for anywhere there's an alternative. I don't think it really has much of a purpose these days.

 

[Harry Bloomfield]

Sorry - I erroneously said I paid £5 per month, it is actually £2 per month.

 

[Ivor Windybottom]

Don't think I've ever paid any bank any money ever. I'm already lending them my money, I'm not giving them money on top.

 

[motorbiking]

Back in the day when we had a mortgage (brag, brag), we had a Barclays offset mortgage and current account. Every penny we had in the current account was deducted from the mortage balance daily. So we effectively got the full mortage rate in interest on all our money from payday until spending it.

Plus it was a base-rate tracker, taken out in 2005 at base-rate + 0.39%. We were very happy post 2008, basically the money we should have paid in interest paid off the balance. Sometimes gamblers do win. Actually I just hated the idea of paying a stack of fees every few years for a fixed mortgage, so variable seemed likely to be less in reality even if base rates stayed the same.

I had a one account. Basically the same thing and paid mine off in 2 years. I became obsessed with beating the graph every month and watching the years to pay plummet. You don’t realise how little of your monthly payments go to debt reduction in the first few years. Once you get ahead of it, it spirals down