On Being Charged Overdrawn Account Fee

Christmas is fast approaching and with all the dramas/changes at work and crazy pre-Christmas social life along with huge plans in the making for next year, I had a mega brain freeze. Totally forgot about my fortnightly mortgage payment was due to be direct debited out of my account earlier this week and I had already rotated all my savings from my transaction account into my high interest savings account.

For that, I got penalised $10. Because I am very rarely overdrawn, I know that a friendly call to my bank will mean they'll reverse the charge and that's exactly what happened a few years ago and it happened again today =) The friendly lady who fielded my call said, "Because you haven't got a history of overdrawing your account, we can reverse the fee straight away for you." Awesome! Finally good behaviour gets recognised and rewarded ...or should that be instead, bad behaviour gets rewarded from a history of good behaviour ;p

My transaction account pays a dismal 0.01% interest so I always rotate the funds into my two other high interest saving accounts where one account pays 5.5% interest and the other 6%. Why aren't all my funds in the 6% interest account? There are withdrawal restrictions and if I breach my withdrawal restrictions then I get penalised by losing 50% of the interest and the rate drops down to only 3%. Whereas the 5.5% savings account has no restrictions on withdrawals and is flexible enough for me to use as a semi-transactional account. Most of the time, I use my fantastic-plastic anyway and pay that off at the end of the billing month so I'm infrequently transacting from any of my saving accounts.

Do you read the fine prints before you sign documents? I'm one of those (anal) people who reads the terms and conditions booklets all the time. I also never sign anything until I've read every single little fine print on documents that I'm given to sign. I read that wise advice somewhere several years ago and it has always stuck with me. It was something along the lines of, 'don't feel pressured to sign anything, if you need a few weeks to read a document, tell them that and don't put yourself under duress to sign the document on the spot without having read all the terms and conditions.'

As per the proverb: measure twice, cut once.