After the initial positivity of speaking to many of my creditors over the past month, I had to deal with the big one at the end of last week. This was HSBC. I’d banked with them for around 15 years and up until now felt some loyalty there. I’d made a point of not maxing out the overdraft now and trying to settle things on good terms. The last time I spoke with Stepchange they told me that HSBC were happy to let them manage things on my behalf. So it came as a massive shock when I had to speak with someone there for over an hour and they denied ever hearing anything from Stepchange. I was grilled on why I was struggling now even though I explained my situation with my tax bills multiple times. I explained that my income should pick up once the new tax year starts but that I would not manage to pay much back until after I had paid my tax bill. I think this advisor was not happy that I had opened a new bank account elsewhere and now I’m glad that I did this as I can well imagine HSBC being one to help themselves to all of my income to pay back what I owe them.
My loyalty was definitely misplaced; I think I might not have ended up in such a mess if I had switched my bank account years ago. I did think of it around three or four years ago when we had initially cleared everything with that secured loan. I opened a Monzo account and had planned to use that for everyday spending whilst keeping HSBC for my income and bills. In hindsight I should have made a completely clean break, but also I don’t think Monzo is quite as good as Starling who I’m now using. The tools these “challenger” banks have to help split up income into different saving or spending amounts and to analyse spending are on another level compared to the likes of HSBC and actually make budgeting possible when we’re all moving away from having cash in our pockets.
Word of the day here is “kanban”. In the same way that kanban is a tool to visualise work that can sometimes be a bit intangible, now that we spend more contactless, with cards or phones, it is good to have tools to visualise this spending. So I say, “Goodbye, HSBC! And thanks for all the fish.” Though, in point of fact, I suspect the interest I’ve been charged by HSBC means that they should probably be thanking me. That’s a task for another day. One day I’m going to add up all the interest these people have taken from me.
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