Accounting the days

[j4]

Alliance and Leicester are playing a game with me. Every so often they cock up something to do with one of the three accounts I have with them, usually something non-critical but sufficiently annoying that I have to sort it out. And every time, I ring up, and (sometimes after a fair amount of phone-shuffling and buck-passing) some pleasant young person sorts everything out efficiently and cheerfully, and goes the extra mile in a way that makes me think "Yeah! These people are all right!"

It was only just now (during a phone call so tortuous that I had to twitter about it to keep myself sane, in which I had to ascertain why they thought my current account had closed; if they didn't, why they'd disabled the linked savings account; why they'd sent me two COA letters changing my address from this one to, er, this one; and whether I could have a new card please because I've worn this one out) that I started to wonder whether they are cocking things up deliberately so that they can impress me by fixing them...

Then they offered me a free Financial Advice session, "to see if the accounts I've got are right for my needs". Since this is something I've been trying to research myself and never quite getting round to changing anything, this offer actually comes at exactly the right time. Hurrah! Alliance and Leicester are great. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt again, and forget about all the cockups (and the hold music, which is the worst kind of noodly liftmusic except for one tiny glitch where the track skips) until next time.

Now all I need is the time to take them up on their offer. Three days left in the current job. That's less than 24 working hours. Expect me to be even more busy and stressed than I have been recently anyway...

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Agreed, although A&L's current account is actually quite good (pays 5% on balance up to 2Kish and has 0% overdraft), and they did (do?) offer a regular savings account paying 10%.

I recommend an icici savings account - they emailed me t'other day to say the rate was now 6.05%.

[j4.livejournal.com]

The regular savings account at 10% is a fixed-period fixed-amount thing that's linked to the current account, you get it for a year from opening the current account, you set the amount you're paying in each month at the beginning and can't change it after that. Which I was quite annoyed about because I went for quite a conservative account (thinking "if I end up earning more money I can put the amount up"), but hey, that's my stupid fault for not reading the small print carefully enough...

I think the savings accounts that I've got are now quite a bit worse than the current account. This is clearly daft.

Will look into icici though - thanks for the tip. :)

[caramel-betty.livejournal.com]

Pretty much all the high-profile, regular-saver, 7-10% headline figure accounts are like that. I wouldn't feel too bad about it, as every time these come up on programmes like Money Box, they have to go into excruciating detail about what the accounts are *really* like.