Friday 27 April 2018

The Banking Royal Commission

is throwing up some interesting information. 
I suspected it might. I have no doubt that other people also suspected it would.
My father's late cousin once told me that he didn't think banks were making too much profit - but he had bank shares and was doing very nicely from them.  
It's a different story if you owe a bank money. You want a mortgage? Oh  yes, we will let you have the money - at a price.
You can't repay the loan?  No, we aren't interested in renegotiating the terms. 
And so it goes on.
My own banking is fairly simple. I try to avoid going to the bank. I am still "old-fashioned" in that I use cash when I can. The good reason for that is that I find it difficult to manipulate the tiny keys on some machines - and the card doesn't always work the way it is intended to work.  Still, I can use the "hole in the wall" or the ATM. I like receipts too.
I paid one of my irregular trips to the bank last week. The person who served me was pleasant enough. I didn't do what I normally do, check to see that my old-fashioned passbook had been correctly brought up to date. Yes, I know. I can hear you saying it, "You need to come into the 21stC Cat!" 
But, last week, I went to the dentist and I fitted a quick trip to the bank before that. I then went to the dentist and forgot to look at the passbook. 
Yesterday something nudged me to look at it. There's an error there. I checked with the "hole in the wall". Yes the money had been put in so I don't need to go back to the bank. I know that it can be rectified in my pass book next time I go to the bank.
But, it was a simple transaction and the teller made a mistake in that he did not record all of it in my passbook. If someone can make a mistake there how many other mistakes are being made? I wasn't distracting him with conversation. I wanted him to get the job done because I had to be somewhere else but I was not in so much of a hurry that I was being impatient. What happens if he is under pressure? What happens when those responsible for major  transactions are under pressure?
I have to do the Senior Cat's banking too these days. It is something I detest doing. I loathe being responsible for other people's money. If I owe someone change when I do their shopping I want to get it back to them as quickly as possible.
Obviously the people who work in finance and banking don't think the way I think. Being a financial planner would be a nightmare job for me. I would be terrified I would give someone the wrong advice and end up losing money for them. Being the Treasurer of an organisation is the one officer position I never ever want to hold. 
There was a subject I did not need to do in Law School. It was a compulsory subject for the Accounting-Law students. The rest of us could do things like Social Welfare Law but they had to do something called, "Banking, Finance and Insolvency Law". It was however renamed right from the start and called,
"Banking, Finance and Insanity Law".
That's about right. 

1 comment:

Jodiebodie said...

I'd be lost without my receipts. They are essential for me in keeping an accurate budget. It always surprises me when shop assistants ask, "Would you like your receipt?"
"Well, of COURSE I do!"

I realise that, in this day and age of electronic banking, every transaction should appear on the bank statement but bank statements are not always reliable and not every transaction is electronic. There have been bank errors in my statements before!

A receipt is my physical record, my primary evidence of the real transaction taking place.

How do other people manage without their receipts as records of their transactions?