I was chatting with a friend of mine last night who was relating a phone call he had received from his bank who were encouraging him to “move forward” to their prestige banking account and all that comes with it for just R199 per month…55 “free” transactions, help with forex, 12 free cheques (does any one still use these?) blah, blah, blah,etc, etc, etc…
What amazes me is how easily people buy the marketing nonsense and how “loyal” people appear to be to their bank. The reality is that the bank does not care about your loyalty – they are relying on you continuing to believe that changing bank accounts is about the most difficult thing that you could do…and in some respect, thanks to Isaac Newton’s observation that a body will continue in its state or rest or motion unless acted on by an unbalaced external force, it is.
So here I am – that unbalanced external force telling you to get off your butt and stop wasting money. By changing bank accounts I have saved over R1560 in the past year…that is more than R15000 over a 10 year period…that’s a year of school fees at most primary schools…
You need to decide on the new bank (see below for a comparison) and then print out your most recent bank statement and make a list of all of the debit orders that come off. Then you need to write a standard letter that you can send to them all and cut and paste the relevent info for each company…and voila – it is done!
I kept my old account open for 1 month just to make sure that it all worked and guess what? It did! The only thing I missed was an annual debit – but it was not serious and was easily fixed.
You could also use the exercise as an opportunity to go over all your debit orders to make sure that you really still need them all – you could well be wasting more money than you think. And as they say in the classics…”look after the cents and the rands will take care of themselves…”
I’ve know that I have moved forward…just hope I dont need to move too soon again!
Basic banking fee comparison (this is for a fixed-fee offering on a current account and is based on information currently on the bank website):
- Capitec – R4.50 but you pay per transaction after that – very competitive!
- Nedbank Savvy account – R69 (have not paid a cent more than this each month for the past 12 months).
- FNB – Smart Cheque – R69
- ABSA – Silver Cheque account – R99
- Std Bank Classic current account – R95
- The last 3 accounts do not appear to be “unlimited” transactions and you could pay more – read the fine print and ask questions.
