Direct To Your Wallet/Purse

[jambutty]

I’ve just searched the forum member database for a Mr JB and there isn’t one. However I interpret your post #28 as being directed at me. Surely it is a common courtesy to address a person by their proper name?

Which part of:

Provided you credit your Bank Account or Cheque Account with at least £1,500 each month (internal transfers from first direct accounts excluded), keep an average monthly balance in excess of £1,500 or have an additional product (see next question for details) with first direct you will not incur our banking fee.

and

By month we mean calendar month. As a guide, to calculate your average monthly balance, add together the end of day balances for each day during the month in question, then divide your total by the number of days in that month.

do you not understand entwisi?

If you pay in £100 the balance at the end of that day will be £100. If you withdraw that £100 the next day and then deposit it again the same day that day’s balance will be £100. If you did that for all 30 days in a 30 days month the daily balance would be £100 each day. Thus the total daily balances would be £3,000 at an average of £100 and thus liable for the £10 fee. However if you did the same but with £1,500 or more then there would be no fee.

I agree that Semantics is a wonderful topic for discussion. However how would you interpret “(internal transfers from first direct accounts excluded),”? Withdrawing cash from an account and then depositing that same amount back in is tantamount to an internal transfer. Whether First Bank take that view remains to be seen but it is irrelevant to the issue and that is, as WillowTheWhisp has so elogantly quoted, “keep an average monthly balance in excess of £1,500” How can that be interpreted in any other way than to what it states?

Yes WillowTheWhisp

You will be charged £10 for any month you do not pay in at least £1,500 or maintain an average monthly balance in excess of £1,500, unless you take out an additional product with us (see answer to earlier question for details of which products qualify).

It couldn’t be clearer. But aren’t you forgetting “or maintain an average monthly balance in excess of £1,500,”

I will ask you the same question WillowTheWhisp, “Do you understand it now or are you going to keep on contradicting yourself?”

[entwisi]

Originally Posted by jambutty

I’ve just searched the forum member database for a Mr JB and there isn’t one. However I interpret your post #28 as being directed at me. Surely it is a common courtesy to address a person by their proper name?


Which part of:
and
do you not understand entwisi?

If you pay in £100 the balance at the end of that day will be £100. If you withdraw that £100 the next day and then deposit it again the same day that day’s balance will be £100. If you did that for all 30 days in a 30 days month the daily balance would be £100 each day. Thus the total daily balances would be £3,000 at an average of £100 and thus liable for the £10 fee. However if you did the same but with £1,500 or more then there would be no fee.

However your total deposits will have been £1500 and have therefore met the criteria. It does not say a balance of £1500 to be paid in. it says that £1500 must go through your account and this fits it

Originally Posted by jambutty

[SIZE=3][FONT=Times New Roman]I agree that Semantics is a wonderful topic for discussion. However how would you interpret “(internal transfers from first direct accounts excluded),”? Withdrawing cash from an account and then depositing that same amount back in is tantamount to an internal transfer.

No it quite clearly is not. When you withdraw the cash it is outside of First Direct and as such a deposit of £100 is then a new transaction

Originally Posted by jambutty

Whether First Bank take that view remains to be seen but it is irrelevant to the issue and that is, as WillowTheWhisp has so elogantly quoted, “keep an average monthly balance in excess of £1,500[COLOR=black]” How can that be interpreted in any other way than to what it states?

But as previously described, the criteria are governed by an OR statement, that means that any single one meeting its criteria means that the outcome is true.

Originally Posted by jambutty

Yes WillowTheWhisp
It couldn’t be clearer. But aren’t you forgetting “or maintain an average monthly balance in excess of £1,500,”

I will ask you the same question WillowTheWhisp, “Do you understand it now or are you going to keep on contradicting yourself?”

See above, its an OR expression

[accymel]

The banks want to tread lightly with this tho because without people depositing money there would be no banks or their services, funny how the costs of things go up tenfold but your incomes dont match it

[WillowTheWhisp]

OR

It's not the same as 'and'.

[Margaret Pilkington]

First Direct Bank is recorded as making £34 BILLIONs in profit last year......Ok so they are in it to make a profit, we have established that......£34billion is a good whack of money to me.

Other banks are said to be watching the outcome of these charges, so it is likely that there will be more snouts in the trough soon.

[WillowTheWhisp]

Jambutty. if I offered you a choice of drinks. tea, coffee or hot chocolate - would you think tea/coffee was one drink and hot chocolate was the other?

[MUMMIBOO]

I just think that we have been forced into using the banks in the first place IE:- wages get paid into bank no cash in hand allowed any more.
benifits get paid into banks no post office use any more, so you see i dont think we should pay its been forced upon us to use the bank in the first place!

Why should people have to change accounts to prevent having to pay fee's.

Why fix it if its not broken?

[entwisi]

Margaret, First Direct is part of HSBC which is a massive global bank, nowhere near that much was made from personal customers, the vast majority come from Investment banking, private clients (i.e. mega rich), business loans etc.

The personal retail financial industry is normally lucky to even break even.

e.g. did you know that if your account is with first direct and you use a Barclays cashpoint (via Link) it costs FD 50p for each transaction? so if you get a balance and then withdraw cash it costs them a pound. yet poeple here think they should provide all these services for free????

[Margaret Pilkington]

Yes Ian, I did know that First Direct was part of the HSBC group and I know that much of their profits come from investment and business.....however, I didn't know the bit about Link facilities being charged to the bank.

I don't think that services should be free, because in effect they aren't really.
The bank gets to use our money for their investments......we get nothing in the way of interest on a current account.....and personally I have never been overdrawn.....I have no agreed overdraft because I am very prudent with the money we possess.
As stated in other threads, you cannot live life today without a bank account.My pension goes directly into my account with no option for any other means of payment.
If the fee charging is seen by other banks to be a success, then many other banks will follow and perhaps will not be as 'lenient' in their protocols as FD are being. This will inevitably lead to the poorer people in the population being worse off. Bank really don't want to provide services to the poor and the pensioners because they make very little money out of them.

This is how the charging system in Oz started out....now EVERYONE pays for all bank services.

[entwisi]

So why not use a savings account for all but a small amount of money and setup SOs between your accounts so that money is in the right place for when DDs etc go out, once its setup it will run like clockwork and you will get teh most benefit from your money. a lot of banks even offer auto top ups from savings if your current account is about to go overdrawn.

Banks may not want to provde services for the poor but teh gov has already made sure that they have to free of charge

[Margaret Pilkington]

Mostly it is laziness on my part,but I suppose in some respects I don't feel comfortable with those kind of arrangements...call me a control freak if you like, but I don't like DD's or SO's. So far in my adult life I have been fortunate not to get into any financial scrapes......but I know of those who have. I have some investments and that is where the savings go....and before you ask...YES I know that I pay administration costs on those savings.
A savings account would be just too easy to access...and I have a hubby with expensive tastes

[WillowTheWhisp]

Having worked on the "other side" I can happily say that the SO and DD horror stories are the exceptions - otherwise I would never pay my bills that way.

In the olden days we used to actually print out sheets of perforated coupons to send through to other banks!

[jambutty]

It may have escaped your notice entwisi and WillowTheWhisp but the humble comma has other uses than pretending to be the word OR.

It can also pretend to be the word AND as in “John and Fred and Mary and Susan all went to the fair.” That is a bit incongruous and the sentence would ordinarily be written as, “John, Fred, Mary and Susan all went to the fair.”

Thus in the sentence:
Provided you credit your Bank Account or Cheque Account with at least £1,500 each month (internal transfers from first direct accounts excluded), keep an average monthly balance in excess of £1,500 or have an additional product (see next question for details) with first direct you will not incur our banking fee.
the comma after the closing bracket could be either AND or OR. Which is the question.

Well considering that the author of the sentence wrote “…….. excess of £1,500 or have an additional ……..” and did not use the word or in “……excluded), keep an average ……” but used a comma instead, it is not unreasonable to read that comma to mean AND. I feel that if the author intended the comma to mean OR he would have written OR and not put a comma and had intended it to mean AND.

Now some professor of English language could come along and explain why that comma meant OR or AND but the FAQ’s were not written for professors of English language but for bank customers.

Thus neither you or I are right or wrong and we should agree to disagree on that point until it can be clarified by First Bank. However not having an account with First Bank it does not concern me directly but First Bank customers need to get the point clarified before 1st February 2007, otherwise they could be labouring under a mishaprehention and find themselves being charged the £10 fee.

I would just add that this sort of ambiguity is not uncommon where money matters are concerned.

[entwisi]

I'm sorry Jambutty but you are quite simply wrong, the comma does have the ability to be either "and" or "or" and THIS IS BASED on the final operator. In the case of everything YOU have quoted it clearly states OR. The FAQs were written to be clear and concise using the correct English syntax that would also stand up in a court of law. They are not ambiguous and to be honest if you think they are then perhaps you should consider your command of the language we claim to speak in this land. To use the operator "or" twice in the same sentance as you suggest would break the rules of grammar.


Perhaps its not what is written that is unclear, it is your comprehension that is flawed


PS, as has been pointed out, £1 in a savings account is enough to stop any charges.

[jambutty]

I’m not going to argue with you about my comprehension of English grammar because in this day and age that has become subjective. I would point out that the FAQ’s were written recently for the people living today not yesterday.

Before bowing out of this topic I will confine myself to one final sentence that demonstrates the use of OR several times and still be grammatically correct.

If I intended to kill myself I could do it by jumping off a cliff or putting a bullet through my head or hanging myself or indeed taking poison. I could have used three commas instead of three of the OR’s but either way the sentence is correct.

Verb sap!