How you react to this sot of (HSBC) bank teller experience?

But people forget about that. Ditto in the civil service for a lot of friends - they couldn`t afford to live on their wage without the pension arrangements, as it means that they are supported when older, and hence don`t need to build up their own pension. I know quite a few people doing jobs that simply don`t pay a livable wage if the pension benefits where removed.

In message , Jim D writes

Banking is based on trust. If you dont trust your bank, or its staff, you should close your account right away.

And as has happened in the private sector with companies that decided "there's enough in there, we'll skip a year or two"... when the shares dipped, there was no longer a surplus - they were deeply underfunded.

Companies who maintained payments saw their funds dip, but came out of it far better.

Yes indeed, those with a bigger surplus survived better then the stockmarket dipped than those with a smaller surplus, but there still needed to be sufficient a surplus in place at the time the pension holiday was taken and this surplus need to entirely cover the cost of it (and as the law caps the level of surplus a fund can have so many schemes had to take either employee or employer holidays) while still leaving the scheme able to pay its liabilities.

So the point is, taking a holiday simply to delay contributions that would require an increase in council tax suggests the scheme was not actually fully funded or would cease to be fully funded at the end of the financial year (otherwise no increase in employer payments requiring council tax increases would be necessary and it would not need to be delayed). You are therefore suggesting that wrong doing has taken place rather than just the legitimate use of a surplus.

The days of poorly paid civil service employees are long gone, just a shame the noncontributory, retire in your 50s, pension schemes that those of us in the private sector who are without a decent pension, pay for with our taxes.

Perhaps I am. I see no "legitimate use" of a pension fund other than to provide benefit to its members. If I have an ongoing obligation to pay something I pay at least as much as would have been expected to get the (as near as dammit) necessary return, and ignore temporary market blips where it seems you've ended up with more than you bargained for.

An illustration of that point perhaps is that I factored to be able to pay my mortgage if the rates went to 15-17% (it was around that mark in the mid-80's IIRC) - just because interest rates went down over time leading to a reduction in my overall debt, I didn't take any payment holidays or additional "capital release schemes" despite being offered them regularly.

While i'm on my soapbox :-} why the f*** are "executives" of a company given preferential pensions - they're only staff, the same as everyone else, and should p*ss in the same pension pot without exception* - it might make them think a little harder before they gamble it.

• OK, maybe one exception - where its a family-run company / self-made, rather than hired help

PS: if you hadn't already guessed, i'm not a finance bod :-}

Try seeing how much an office clerk gets these days - not the managerial end of the payscale.

Cash only credits at HSBC are input immediately by a cashier if its done at a till, the paying in slip is used as a record of the amount you've paid in, incase of discrepancies later. I've always wondered what happens at a bank where you can pay in with your card at the counter, how do they solve "my account has been credited with £100 but i paid in £400"? (ie a typo)

In the HSBC system the batch processing would pick up any discrepancies between what is input by the cashier and what is written on the slip when its optically read and compared, and the slip provides written confirmation if later required.

Cash and Cheque credits are input, but the cash only shows on the account the following morning as per a cheque only credit.

There are Paying in machines being installed which can count, check and credit mixed notes to an HSBC account immediately, and also others which you can simply tip mixed coin into which will sort, count and credit (although i think this is later in the day). Certainly the first and probably the second can work by either a card or by typing in a sort code and account number.

Ian

HSBC have been using those for years at many of their offices overseas. I wondered why they hadn't introduced them in the UK before now.

Chris

The automatic deposit machines at a branch of HSBC I sometimes use give you a receipt containing a photocopy of any cheques you deposit printed on thermal paper. I thought that was an excellent system.

Chris

Try seeing how much a bollard painter in brum gets whilst off sick.

I don't trust my bank, but I'm still happy to bank with them. I thought banking was based on the concept that the bank was legally obliged not to embezzle my money, and that if they took money that was rightfully mine I would have redress through the courts.

Don't you check ever your bank statements?

Adam

Because as I said above, I bank with HBoS. They're supposed to be all together now, no? I have a "Halifax web saver" account. Won't that do? Surely Halifax should be able to find my websaver and *from there* find my non-HBoS current account to which it is linked for the purpose of shifting funds into and out of it. Anyway, I suspect you won't even be able to pay into my websaver because H and BoS aren't really as together as they would like to have us believe.

Thank you for confirming that you were exaggerating when you said "given a name and an address they can find you very easily at the Halifax". What you said was evidently ambiguous and I took it to mean that if you go to a Halifax branch with someone's name and address (irrespective of where they bank) they could find you. After all, the banks are all in cohoots with each other, so it shouldn't be a problem.

If you actually meant they could do this only if the payee also banks with them, that is more believable (and therefore I don't doubt it), but it's not very useful in general, because in general if all you have is someone's name and address, how are you supposed to know who they bank with? OK, so you could try on the off chance that they might bank with Halifax, but if it doesn't work, you're stuffed, aren't you? Who's going to choose their landlord on the basis of whether they bank with Halifax? :-)

Since I don't know anyone who banks with the Halifax (except you), and since in any case there are no (genuine non-HBoS) Halifax branches here of which I'm aware, that wouldn't be a terribly feasible experiment.

Can you give an example of which jobs you`re talking about please then? I know the job that I do really wouldn`t be worth doing without the pension arrangements, it`d have to pay at least 6k a year more to make it worth the work.

And would you rather pay the civil servants the "real-world" wage for the jobs? I know how much is contributed towards my pension (effectively, I know it doesn`t quite work like that) and I know how much I pay. I also know how much extra the job is worth in the real world - it`s a fair bit more than the extra cost of my pension.

The reason I couldn`t pay into your websaver is because they refuse to accept cash credits for it over the counter (or certainly have when I tried to pay in). Instead I paid it into a current account and moved it over.

If you took it to mean that, then I have to wonder about the logic behind it - while it may have been ambiguous, I would have imagined that any common sense at all would have led you to conclude that it would only be the case if you banked with them also.

The simple way is to ask - like "since you`re passing the Halifax, can you pay this in for me please". that`s how I get this to work.

And indeed it led me to conclude just that, which is why I queried it because it seemed what you said didn't agree with what you must have meant.

Fair enough.

Yep, can't believe the amount of fannying about my wife has to pay money into Barclays. Me, pop into halifax, go to the express counter hand card and cash over and say "I want that cash into that account". One card swipe and print out later all done. Takes less than 2 minutes, even with the "Do you want a loan/credit card/insurance" sales pitch (which isn't that often on the express counter!).

In message , Adam writes

Err, but that obligation is the same for everybody else in the world, it is not just restricted to banks!

Would checking your BCCI statements had made any difference?

Do you trust everybody you meet? If a guy who knocked on your door and who said he could fix your roof for a thousand quid would you give him the £1k just because he is as obliged to act honestly as the bank is?.

Lets look at the concept of lending money. Interest is a reward for risk.

In message , snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com writes

After swiping the card a slip is printed with the amount on and you then sign it to confirm the amount. They then give you a receipt.