171–180 of 287 posts
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No need, almost every big EU bank has a representation in London (at least, for the time being).
Some banks are already moving to Amsterdam (or have plans), like Royal Bank of Scotland and MUFG, Japan’s biggest bank. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/aug/04/rbs-plans-m... https://www.ft.com/content/158dcffe-7535-11e7-90c0-90a9d1bc9...
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If you're talking about a checking or savings account, you can safely close it without it affecting your credit score. Closing a credit account could affect your score, but unless your checking account has a credit product attached (e.g. an overdraft protection line of credit) that gets reported to credit reporting agencies, it won't have any impact. You can use https://annualcreditreport.com once per year to get a c…
I doubt closing a credit account hurts your score. Even if it does, you'd be more credit worthy to a lender because you have less credit outstanding/available. And the credit score can improve later if other credit is operating normally. Credit score is only one item they look at for large loan like a mortgage. Smaller loans like a car or credit cards are already easy to get.
I don't know how much impact it has, certainly less than late payments or accounts in collections, but it can have some effect.
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> The only way to solve in the short term is to spread the risk across many banks, and never keep your money in one place. This is always good advice, and when you reach the maximum amount for which an account is insured (100K or thereabouts) it is an absolute must. I have my funds spread over five accounts just in case and make sure you note the legal differences between savings accounts and current accounts, the la…
I may be mistaken but I thought FDIC deposit insurance didn't apply to business accounts anyway.
Regardless it is good practice to know exactly what the state of affairs of your bank accounts are and to really spend some time to read the fine print regarding balances and what will happen to them if the bank should go under or cease operations for whatever reason.
In NL by the way DNB will guarantee business accounts as well.
Example from Triodos Bank:
https://www.triodos.nl/nl/zakelijk/service/veelgestelde-vrag...
(in Dutch)
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Basically yes - the law changed and the banks are just taking advantage of it. Part of this is that while under investigation they are not allowed to talk to you, and have no motivation to act quickly. I have read in a lot of cases, once they start the process it is very unlikely it will end well. You will, of course, get your money back (assuming you can prove everything they want). They will close your account and…
The other comments on here about having multiple accounts for businesses can be a little tricky as some banks will not open a second business account if you already have done opened with someone else. e.g I had Lloyds business bank, tried Metro bank but they refused to open until I could prove Lloyds was closed. I wonder what the reasoning behind that is. Surely if I wanted to move my company's banking facilities fro…
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There's nothing to suggest the Bank have "stolen" OP's money.
Actually, and somewhat counter-intuitively, money you put into a bank account belongs to the bank , as an account-holder you have a credit and they have fiduciary duty towards you. But in a very fundamental sense the property of your money has passed to the institution you bank with. They do however have the duty to make it available you, or rather, do as you instruct them to up to the value you banked with them. EDI…
UK banks are ridiculous and they're hastening their own demise to challenger banks with attitudes likes this. My bank (Barclays) suspended my account and blocked my cards after attempting to make a large payment. It was £2000 to the Student Loans Company. My account was a graduate account. All of the clever machine learning anti-fraud algorithms in the world couldn't figure that one out. Go figure.
Why would you make a voluntary payment to SLC (assuming it was voluntary as most repayments are through PAYE)? That is quite an unusual thing to do.
I'm genuinely surprised that high street banks haven't started openly competing with the official student loans already, at least not as far as I've seen. The terms are so abusive for new students today that the banks could easily offer private student loans on significantly better terms for the students and still make a fortune themselves. Maybe they're just assuming -- not unreasonably -- that the whole student funding mess is going to blow up spectacularly within the next few years and they don't want to be caught in the blast when it happens.
I second not dealing with HSBC. They've been fined as mentioned in the article. They've also lost enormous amounts of data through mismanagement and to hackers, so have gone to the other extreme of "safeguarding" their data. I put safeguarding in quotes because a couple years ago I was responsible for the technical aspects of the acquisition of a small fin. book from HSBC. They did a lot of absolute dictation of gove…
Not to pick on you particularly (this is just where I got to in the comments) but who _would_ you recommend instead for others trying to avoid this? Particularly for the UK, since a lot of the time the HN crowd is US-centric :)
This is the problem. There are nightmare stories about basically every major bank and financial service, and while there are two sides to every story, a lot of them certainly look like well justified complaints about wildly inappropriate treatment.
If someone was doing much better, we'd all be using them already. For now, I can only agree with the general advice many are giving: diversify, so you never have personal and business with the same organisation, never have all your essential accounts and cards with the same organisation, and so on.
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Lawyers are expensive, and bank accounts have complicated T&Cs which basically say "We can do what we like, and fuck you." You'll spend a fortune paying someone to argue some or all of the agreement is unenforceable. I would suggest trying to get in contact with other businesses in the same boat. The UK doesn't have a formal class action suit mechanism, but there's nothing to stop you pooling your resources in a join…
>Lawyers are expensive, and bank accounts have complicated T&Cs which basically say "We can do what we like, and fuck you." Dude - did you not notice that all it took was for him to post an online article? They didn't go to him with their T&Cs. Lawyers are expensive for a lot of things, but often all it takes is an official letter from a lawyer. I don't know how expensive that can be, but as someone else pointed out,…
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and that couple would be rich enough to afford a financial advisor anyhow.
500k is nowhere near rich enough to afford a financial advisor; many people save that much easily for retirement. Maybe 2 million.
> I’m just another failed bank card to them, draining their systems.
Well, you're not draining Adobe. You're running Photoshop locally, so you aren't costing them any bandwidth, unlike most of those other services.
That rental model for software you run locally is even worse than most proprietary models. If Adobe weren't effectively a monopoly, I'd hope people would reject this nonsense.