Columns - 16 February 2009
Bankers find new ways of making me pay for taking my pay
It seems that everywhichway you turn these days there is always someone trying to take more from you than you are prepared, willingly, to give. And for a change criminals take the top spot, ironically, for their honesty. At least they don’t pretend that what they are doing has any moral or ethical reasoning or justification apart from their own selfish ends. They take from you with your eyes – and theirs – wide open.
The sooner I can get to a patch of land out in the sticks and grow what I need to eat and keep my money in a shoebox under the bed where it’s safe predators, the better.
Just as well that my, homegrown lettuces and tomatoes are doing well in their little patch of soil under my wash line in suburbia. I needed the cooling taste of fresh lettuce to calm my nerves after a visit this week by the “business manager” of the bank which keeps it’s ever-more needy clutches on the money I earn.
Halfway through a rather pleasant and relaxing conversation, during a visit by my bank’s business managers, this week they dropped the bombshell. It’s so ingenious in its subterfuge, this new way of creaming money off me that it’s quite difficult to explain. But I’ll try. They call it a “commitment fee”. It appears that they are going to charge me for offering me the opportunity to go into overdraft. They have to keep money in the bank, they argue, in case I might, one day, decide I want an overdraft.
So, if I am getting it right, they are going to charge their clients a fee based on the amount that they may want to draw as an overdraft. In other words I must pay them to be a bank.
This is in addition to all the other fees I pay for putting what little money I have into the bank, for taking my money out of the bank, for using the internet for banking and for standing at their grubby machines for self-service banking. This new fee is in addition to the money we pay in interest if we do have an overdraft.
And why are they doing this? Because a gathering of bankers — from the planet Rip-off — decided that this is what they want to do. Simple. Like Fifa, they rule, we play. These are the institutions, don’t forget, who are, by association, aligned to institutions in the US responsible for the recession that threatens, like Eskom, to plunge the world into darkness.
In a more sane world bankers and their ilk should be on their knees begging for forgiveness and not banding together to see how much more they can skin an already skinned and loudly squealing cat.
I was reading a story this week about newspaper readership patterns. A commuter, I think it was on a train somewhere near Johannesburg, said he did not like reading newspapers on trains. People look over his shoulder to read his paper, he said, and “steal” his news. So he folds the newspaper after looking at the headlines and reads it in a more private space where his news can’t be stolen.
The way I’m thinking, out in the country living off the fruits and vegetables of my own market garden, I will not want news that can be stolen, banks to charge me for things I don’t have and criminals on every corner.
This column appeared in the Cape Times on 16 February 2009.
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