More ‘Personal Reserve’ issues…
Thursday 12th June, 2008 - £8,920.19 in debt…
As a Barclays customer with a fair number of bank charges to reclaim, I’m sensing that something unsavoury might be afoot.
You might recall that, a couple of weeks ago, Barclays announced that it was launching what it calls a “personal reserve” - an additional amount on top of a customer’s overdraft, which will act as a buffer. As I’m always going over my overdraft limit, I was happy to hear about this. Today I received the paperwork through the post.
From August 18th this year, there will be a £150 reserve added to my £3,000 overdraft limit. This means that, for a fee of £22 (for every five consecutive days I use the reserve), Barclays will honour payments up to £150 over my limit. Isn’t that lovely of them? They’re referring to it as “a little extra breathing space”. Bless. If I go over the reserve amount, obviously they will have to charge a “returned transaction fee” of £8, but who can blame them?
Well, I can blame them. Call me paranoid, but isn’t this just a way of renaming their fees so that I can’t claim them back if the high court decides that overdraft charges are unfair? After all, apparently I’ll be paying for a so-called service.
If I go over my new limit, I’ll still pay £30 (the same amount I’m paying now), but at best I’ll only be able to claim back the £8 “over-overdraft-and-reserve” charge.
The thing that bothers me the most is the bank’s patronising attitude to its customers, who are all easily-led simpletons as far as Barclays are concerned. All over their little explanatory leaflets is the message: ”Gone over your overdraft limit, eh? Don’t worry - we’re here to help! Let’s just give you a bit of cash to sort yourself out and then we’ll forget all about it, okay?”
Of course, what they really mean is “It’s pretty much the same as before, only more complicated because we’re covering our own backs and saving ourselves some money. We need it more than you do. Hope you don’t mind - you can opt out if you do mind, but we’ve done that for our own benefit as well, so that we can say you had a choice. And you’re probably too stupid to tick a box without jabbing yourself in the eye anyway.”
Well, I’m opting out. Stick that in your pipes and smoke it, faceless Barclays bigwigs. Ha.
Olivia Buck Needs Debt Help - Day 42
I received an e-mail today from someone else who had elected to opt out.
I wonder what the take up has been like so far?
HA! The revolution is coming, Barclays - do you hear me?
[…] The Barclays personal reserve may be a wolf in sheep’s […]
I’ve recently arranged my new/re- mortgage with Woolwich (now part of Barclays) and although i got the best interest rate i could have dreamed of (5.5%) fixed for 10 years with only a £90 increase in my monthly repayments (this will mean some serious money saving practices to keep me debt free!) i WOULDN’T recommend them to anyone. Trying to contact them is an absolute nightmare…20 minutes…30 minutes…etc on hold each time i try and ring them! And the sales pitch for the reserve account was cringe worthy!!! They make it sound so good only briefly mentioning that there is a fee for using it!
Having been on the phone for nearly an hour (not including being on hold for 25 minutes!) i am now so glad i had enough of my brain still working to not set an amount on the reserve account and to opt out of it!!! Your blog has reassured me that i did the right thing!
Keep at it! I’ll be checking back to see how you’re doing, you’ve given me a few ideas already!
[…] confirming that I’d opted out of the Barclays personal reserve. I already knew that I’d done this, but it’s nice to be […]
I opted out of this as I realised that it would end up being more costly at the end of the day, I live in my overdraft and have to budget very hard to stay within my limits but sometimes i go over. This happened the first month I had the reserve fee and it cost me £44 instead of £30 as it went over the five days til i was paid. I told them i’d rather just be charged the once. And yes it is just a way of rebranding the illegal charges, quite tranparently too.