CONSUMER KINGS : January 2014

Thursday, 30 January 2014

ANDY MURRAY'S MARRIAGE JOKE, AND PACKAGED BANK ACCOUNTS MIS-SELLING

ANDY MURRAY GETTING MARRIED?

During a question and answer session with fans Andy Murray tweeted “We are getting married just after Wimbledon, should be a great day”. An hour or so later Andy said that he was just joking. But in that hour his girlfriend Kim bought a wedding dress, had her bridesmaids measured for bridesmaids outfits, booked the church, reception and honeymoon, sent out the invitations and registered her wedding gift list with John Lewis. And when Andy told her that he’d just been joking I’ll bet that Kim found his joking hilarious.

Yes I’ll bet she did. It was pretty dumb of Kim to believe Andy’s marriage tweet because it came from Andy. Everyone knows that it’s not up to Andy when he gets married, it’s up to his Mum, and there’s no way she’ll let Andy get married until she’s made enough from his earnings for her retirement pot before allowing a wife into the financial equation. Kim and Andy’s Mum Mrs Andy do have a lot in common, they both have the same job. Which is following Andy about to watch him play tennis. If Andy and Kim ever split up she’d have to go out and get a real job and good luck with that because on her CV it’ll read:

2008 till 2014: Occupation: Following my boyfriend about. That won’t qualify her for much so I’m guessing that she’d have to get used to asking the question “Do want fries with that burger?”

BIEBER

Justin “Bad Boy” Bieber has been charged with assaulting a limo driver and that’s really embarrassing for the limo driver. Could you imagine telling anyone that Justin Bieber hit you. Bieber is trying far too hard to be a tough guy. It was the same when Michael Jackson released his album Bad with the tagline “Michael Jackson is Bad”. Every thought no, “Michael Jackson is effeminate”.

After his trouble in Florida an online petition requesting his expulsion from the States got 100,000 signatures. The petitions argument being that he should be kept in Canada until he reaches puberty. Seems reasonable.

PACKAGED BANK ACCOUNTS.

An increased number of banking customers have complained about packaged current accounts in the last year, according to official figures released today.

Gripes about paid-for current accounts soared 155 per cent in the past nine months, figures from the Financial Ombudsman Service showed today.

Packaged current accounts can cost up to £300 a year for ‘perks’ such as travel insurance and breakdown cover which many customers never knew was included, didn’t want or are not eligible to use.

Some have been misled into believing a fee-charging account was their only option or were told they had to take it out to get the loan or mortgage they wanted, the FOS found.

Others were lured into forking out for insurance policies only to later discover they were ineligible to claim on the cover they were paying for.

A year ago the Ombudsman received barely 40 complaints a week about packaged accounts. But in the past nine months it has dealt with 3,107 – 155 per cent more than the rate in the previous financial year.

And these are only those that have been rejected by the banks. This could mean the true number of complaints and compensation payouts is much higher.

The FOS says the majority of complaints are about the way accounts have been sold. Many did not even realise they were paying for a packaged account as they had been ‘upgraded’ without being told.

Complaints about packaged current accounts had the highest upheld rate of any financial gripe to the FOS in the last nine months. Customers won in eight out of ten cases.

In worst case scenarios, people claim they were unwittingly signed up to these ‘rip-off’ deals with fees automatically docked from their account. Many were sold the accounts by pushy staff at the high street banks who were paid commissions for meeting sales targets.

This is Money has received numerous complaints about packaged current accounts from readers.

We also exclusively revealed that Lloyds Bank was to pull paid-for accounts from sale in branches from January 2013 while it retrained staff. It has only re-launched them this month. A whistle blowing member of staff said that accounts now come with fewer sales points attached after pressure from the Financial Conduct Authority in a move to stop them being ‘mis-sold’, something the bank wouldn’t confirm.

Meanwhile, rival Santander axed its packaged current accounts in October citing that it wanted to focus on customer service instead.

Roughly one in five adults have a packaged account, such as Lloyds Bank’s Premier, which costs £25 a month, the Barclays Additions Active account at £15 a month and Halifax’s Ultimate Reward account at £12.50 a month.

But a report by the financial regulator estimated a third of these account holders fail to use the benefits. It also found many were unable to claim on insurance when they needed to.

The banks are now being forced to pay out thousands of pounds in compensation in this latest ‘mis-selling’ scandal. They have already shelled out £13.3billion in compensation for mis-sold payment protection insurance.

Rules brought in by the FCA last March mean all banks must ensure bolt-on insurance policies are suitable for the customer – and are clear and simple to understand.

On top of this banks must send out a letter to all customers every year reminding them they have the account, and to check they are still eligible to claim.

Richard Lloyd, executive director at Which?, said: ‘The FCA must rigorously enforce the rules to prevent mis-selling and take action against any bank that links staff bonuses to the sale of these products.’

A spokesman for the Ombudsman said: ‘The good news is banks are reacting differently to how they did with PPI, when they fought us every step of the way.’

SOURCE: THE DAILY MAIL

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/money/saving/article-2547395/Complaints-packaged-current-accounts-soar-155-nine-months.html

http://www.consumerkings.co.uk/#!reclaim-packaged-accounts/c1ut

£200K A YEAR

The Daily Mail reported that the BBC has offered Laura Kuennsberg £200k a year as the Chief Correspondent for Newsnight. So the BBC haven’t really listened to the Public Accounts Committees demands that the corporation stop chucking the TV licence payers money about.

Newsnight gets 600.000 viewers which is effect means that Laura will be getting paid 33p per viewer. That must be how the BBC work out salaries. They count how many viewers a programme gets and pay whoever is presenting it 33p for every viewer who tunes in.

On occasions I suppose this could be quite cost saving because this means that the BBC pay the presenters of Springwatch about £2 a week, and Kate Humble must be on a annual salary of about £6 a year.

As for Laura, she’s hardly a big ticket name so it is very hard for the BBC to justify paying her £4000 a week, the equivalent of 300 or so annual licence fees. It’s not great PR for Newsnight either and they could do with good PR after the terrible PR of cancelling a programme exposing Jimmy Savile and then falsely accusing Conservative Peer Lord McAlpine of child abuse. Unless of course that Laura’s first piece for Newsnight is an expose on Newsnight urinating the TV licence payer’s money up a wall.

Tuesday, 28 January 2014

THE ROYAL BANK OF SCOTLAND £3.1b ADDED TO THE CON POT

£3.1b

The Royal Bank of Scotland has put aside another load of money to compensate for all the stuff they’ve been up to. This time it’s a £3.1b cash pot to cover fines and compensation for PPI(www.consumerkings.co.uk) mortgage mis-selling, interest rate hedging products, throwing bricks through its customers windows, forcing those in overdraft to work in an RBS sweatshop making Sir Fred Goodwin is Great T shirts, mugs, baseball caps and car stickers and making every RBS customer buy expensive special RBS insurance which covered them against alien abduction, being trampled in any stampede of people rushing to see Jesus at his second coming and burglary.

HOUSEBREAKERS

But the burglaries were only covered if homes were burgled by the house breaking team of Elvis and the Loch Ness monster.

It has to be asked though, were they running a bank or running a racket. Even the Mafia said “Wow,they make us look like a of amatuers”.

Was there anything regarding money that they weren’t up to?. Apparently not. Fixing interest rates, manipulating the foreign currency market and running the Romanian pick pocketing gangs that blight London. You name it, they did it.

RBS has announced an £8b loss. This is because 3D printing is very, very expensive and the cost of every member of RBS staff 3D printing their bottoms at the RBS Xmas parties has added up to £8b. The Bank could have saved 99.9% of that total if their staff had just photocopied their backsides at Xmas parties like normal people do.

In an interview with the BBC the RBS CEO Ross McEwan explained to Robert Peston why most senior executives would not be receiving bonuses this year. He took Robert Peston to the window of his office and pointed to a large group of people standing with pitchforks and burning torches in the RBS car park.

In 2008 RBS was bailed out to the tune of £46b and is now 80% owned by the taxpayer and Ross admits that it is highly unlikely that the money will ever be repaid. He did say though that any taxpayer who feels aggrieved by the never, ever repayment can pop into any branch of RBS and help themselves to a Sir Fred Goodwin is Great T shirt, mug, baseball cap or car sticker. You have to feel a bit sorry for Ross McEwan though because he has one of the worst jobs in the world. It’s up there with Gordon Brown’s smiling coach, Dave Lee Travis’s agent and the manager of the book shop in Leeds that only sells Jimmy Saville autobiography.

However some RBS are looking at 200% of their annual salary bonuses. Only payable to members of RBS staff who weren’t involved in any shenanigans. Now 200% may sound excessive but collectively if it is paid at all won’t actually add up to very much. Basically two cleaners at RBS will be entitled to it, and they are due it because they keep RBS’s Edinburgh HQ spotless.