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.
