Hi all - I'm new to this site, and after many months of thinking about it, I've decided to take action.
Have always been up-front with my bank. Always contacted them if I felt there may be a problem (ie. gone over overdraft limit, not sufficient funds for DD, etc). Sometimes, they have refunded fees levied, but most of the time has used the catch-all excuse of me 'breaching the original conditions when I opened the account' blurb.
The icing on the cake was when my son's father passed away suddenly in February of this year. The maintenance I received monthly from him obviously didn't go into my account in March onwards, and this created a shortfall on my account, and subsequently I started to sink in the mire of fees for exceeding o/d limit and bounced DDs. I wrote to them, asking that they help me out - ie. open another account so I could live day by day and pay back the amount, and for them to freeze interest and to stop the excessive fees, which were spiralling out of control. Of course, they refused.
So now, here I am (sorry for the ramble!!) and I'm now determined that they will not get away with this! I'm someone who is quite pragmatic when it comes to being charged. I took the view that if I went over my limit, or lived beyond my means, that I 'deserved' to have to pay a fee for it. But now, in light of, a) the fact that even when I am up-front and ask for help and not bury my head in the sand makes no difference to them helping, and b) in light of the recent up-roar over customers paying over the odds for these fees, enough is enough
So - I've now used the S.A.R - (Subject Access Request) template, and found the right address, and will be sending it off in the post today (gulp). I've 'gee'd myself up by reading up everything I can on this site, and the success stories are phenomenal. Power to you guys!!!! There's still a little seed of doubt inside of me, however. I guess I don't generally feel very lucky and the paranoid little seed is saying that if someone's gonna fail, it's gonna be me!!! (I know, highly irrational, but there you go!) :grin:
Anyhoooo...that's me in a (rambling) nutshell
Question: I'm going all the way with this case against Nationwide. But, can I claim interest and fees back from a credit card company, if I've paid them in full and no longer hold an account? Also, I'm paying off a consolidated loan via a DCA (Metropolitan) on behalf of First Direct, and wondered if I can claim anything back for this one too?
Looking forward to reading further the success stories on here.
And, want to say a huge thanks to the guys who run this site - a huge undertaking and a worthy cause!
MC
