Be Excellent To Each Other

My bank (Halifax) appears to have an issue with Irish Ferries. I always have some problem when booking online.

So today booked online, card declined.

Its been a while since I've booked so I think its me putting the wrong details so try again and its all booked.

Get a text message from my bank (just after the 2nd booking attempt) saying that the card was used at Irish Ferries and to reply Yes if its a genuine transaction. Reply yes

Another text comes back saying thanks we blocked it so try again in 10 minutes and end by saying thanks for using fraud protection.

Left wondering what the point of the exercise was and if it was Fraud how the fuck I would be protected

Second world countries are a magnet for this sort of fraud, so it probably rang up all kinds of flags.

If it was fraud you would reply with a No, and they still wouldn't let the transaction go through after ten minutes.

Plus they would put a stop on your current card and get a new one to you in the post.

Not at all, I had successfully processed a (2nd) order before I replied to the text message so my bank couldn't have blocked at this point.

So shows how pointless the so called protection is

I got fraud blocked last week because of an unusual set of transactions, but they left Chip and Pin as allowed as the transactions that flagged a risk were all online. That was pretty helpful (although confusing, as I'd only picked up the voicemail having used the card three times after it had been received, so I thought they had unblocked it).

I once bought a new car with my bank card then couldn't pay for the tank of petrol I'd just put in it because of this. Surely the thing to block would have been the thousands of pounds transaction, not the one for fifty quid.

When I bought my first Skoda in 2007 for £12,000 I had to do security questions over the phone before they would process it via the debit card

3 months ago at the same dealer £14,000 this time no questions asked it just went through like it was nothing!

I wish I had £26k in my current account!

I have a mate at work who always makes sure he is well insured. So he pays Barclay Card for some Identity Theft Protection on his card.

The first month was a pain they called him everything he bought stuff on Amazon, but he said at least he was getting something for his money

Then things quietened down, he said they understood his spending profile (mostly IT or gadgets on Amazon) so didn’t call him anymore.

So he gets home one night and there is a receipt for a flight to Paris in his letterbox, he ignores it for the time being as he is traveling to Belgium for work. He gets back 2 days later and another flight receipt this time for Rio, so he calls Barclay Card.

He card has been maxed out to the tune of £15,000. When he finally got the list of spend, they had bought flights, electric guitars and spent a fortune on hair extensions and other stuff from an Afro Caribbean wholesaler.

None of it was in his spend profile, Barclay Card just returned the card balance to zero and he then had to call and say there was £300 worth if his spend on there.

It wasn't for long, my wife has sent me the funds from our savings that she controls so I could pay via a card!

Didn't you once boast being able to buy a house for cash with no mortgage?

Ah yes - that was wildly out of context, and lead to the whole "rich" thing.

I probably could buy a house with the content of my current account, though.

So just for clarity, you're both poor and humble? We like that kind of thing around here.

I'm not allowed to be poor, because I've got a mortgage.

With a mortgage you're more in debt than the penniless tramp on the street. I bet you'd switch with him in a second if you could!

See, that was a in-joke (or, I guess, an out-joke) that I was pretty sure you'd get, of all people.

Hmmm, if you're referencing something from 2007 I might need it spelled out. My memory for these things isn't that great.

Didn't a conversation about "if you were a home-owner, you couldn't be poor" eventually lead to you getting banned from WoS?

I'm perhaps misremembering.

Hmmm, I think was insisting that the mortgage market was only for the well-off, and my counter was that I wasn't rich and didn't earn much, but was still able to get a mortgage pretty easily and that anyone in a similar situation shouldn't face difficulty.

I think it was his insistence that the deck was stacked against him, because social injustice. I think the banning was because I didn't drop it when he went down the 'Agree with me or shut up' route.

With the benefit of time we can see that mortgages *were* being given out very easily back at the height of the pre-crunch market, certainly compared to now.

I could totally buy a house outright with my bank balance

Its the originality that keeps me coming back to this place.

I come for the toast.

Eww.

I watch the evening news.

It's annoyingly fucking hard to get a mortgage at the moment.

What sort of a world are we living in where a man has to sell his wildly impractical, money and gas-guzzling estate car before a mortgage company will agree to loan him any money?

The only hassle we had was the bank that we moved everything to trying to take the first mortgage payment and fees from the account that everything was moved from. When this failed, they sent a letter that we were in arrears and charged us for that. When the mistake was rectified, they took the same amount again as a monthly payment and charged us for over paying. Bonkers. As the house and mortgage is in the wife's name, I left her to deal with it all, I just throw money at her and she spends it.

In the South its like that to buy sell or rent at the moment, you get outbid for sales and rentals, people drop out of your chain or want more money.

A lot of people I know have walked away from moving and are extended what they have as its less hassle in the long run

That's what we are doing, I was toying with getting a place around the corner that's on 2-3 times the plot I'm on and has all the space we need

I could have bought it with an extra 50K on the mortgage. (plus savings and equity increase in our house)

In the end we agreed no more borrowing and we stay put and extend when we have the cash saved.