(03) 9020 2905Debt Man column – The West Australian (Business)
For: July 23, 2010.
Bruce Brammall
Debt Man
I hope you enjoy your breakfast this morning. I won’t. For today, I have the great joy/immense angst and excitement/stress of maybe/possibly moving house. I’m hoping I might get to enjoy dinner.
I haven’t had to do this dreadful chore for nine years. Prior to 2001, I’d done it something like 14 times in 12 years. In my 20s, I was arriving and departing as often as visitors to Dolly Parton’s “Best Little Whorehouse in Texas”.
But they were all rentals. Turn off the mains as you close the door. If you hadn’t actually trashed the place, or let the band practice their rockstar behaviour, you could tidy up the bourbon bottles and collect the bond.
This time is different. When a mortgage is involved, it’s never that simple. But today we have two mortgages.
What happens this morning is we’ll be settling the sale of our previous home and the purchase of our new home within an hour of each other (while, at roughly the same time, collecting household contents from three locations to deliver to the new house).
As many moving parts as a helicopter. And considering the already costly bank errors that have already been painstakingly corrected, it already feels like I’m playing Eric Bana in “Blackhawk Down”.
My bank has already apologised and paid me nearly $700 for their errors. Yep. The house hasn’t even settled and I’ve already received “no-questions-asked-we’re-sorry” compensation for stuff ups.
Hopefully, by the time we arrive at the new house early afternoon, we will own it.
The bank has had three months’ notice of today’s events. Nobody has ever suggested a change to the date. I have regularly asked the bank if there is anything else they require. Any and all paperwork was signed and returned within 24 hours of receipt.
But, honestly, I think I might be dealing with a virgin.
Sssh. Come in close. It’s a little embarassing for them and I’m too scared to ask, but I think this might be the first time my bank has ever settled a mortgage on a property. There’s no other logical explanation for how amateurish the service has been.
And this is no new fly-by-night lender. This is a Big Four bank. It has built a market capitalisation of tens of billions of dollars. My question is: “How!?”
The deposit release was filed without being actioned. I was summonsed, twice, to a branch office to sign paperwork that was neither requested, nor required. Paperwork needing our “URGENT!” signatures never got sent to us. “Don’t worry, we don’t need those signatures now” came the later response.
A few hours later still: “Settlement on your property is going to be delayed because you haven’t signed that urgent paperwork that we just agreed with you was unnecessary.”
Huh?
Oh, forget it. When the sublime turns to the ridiculous, don’t get mad. Moan. Loudly. Want results? Ask for the complaints department.
In my years of being a customer of this bank, I have discovered that the most efficient department is the complaints department. Complaints department staff are definitely NOT virgins. Nudge, wink, if ya know whatta mean.
They are experienced. Their job is to deal in the gutter to fix up the indefensible, and usually unexplainable, errors of their comrades.
They’re The A-Team. Hey, that’s exactly what they are! A crack team of do-gooders sentenced to the bowels of a bureaucracy to help the oppressed in their battles to right the wrongs of an incompetent empire.
They can apologise for offensive customer service! They can arrange financial restitution! They can get things FIXED! They do it efficiently! And, this is really quite bizarre, they seem to do it with a smile in their voice. “No problem, sir, we know exactly how to fix this.”
For all my bank’s errors – dozens, damnit, over a decade – I have no complaints with the complaints departments. They clearly send their best employees there.
They have refunded me buckets of cash in incorrectly charged fees and interest. Hours of my life have been handed back to me from problems being solved.
Tonight, I just want to share a pizza with the DebtKids and a glass of wine with Mrs DebtMan in our new, massively mortgaged, home.
Please, ANZ. If you really live in my world, please.
Bruce Brammall is the author of Debt Man Walking (www.debtman.com.au) and a licensed financial adviser. bruce@debtman.com.au .