Give your bank a sock kapow

Everyone has a love-hate relationship in their life. If you don’t, you should go out and get one.

It should be a pre-requisite for getting a licence to breathe.

Love-hate relationships are about passion. If you’re not passionate about something … anything … you’re probably wasting oxygen. (And your licence to breathe may be revoked!)

Whatever your passion, there’s always an antithesis. This you are drawn to hate with a similar passion.

Charles and Diana. Yin and Yang. Ford and Holden. Collingwood and (tomorrow) Geelong. Superman and Lex Luthor.

My (non-family) passion? Money. More specifically, how money works. And that passion has led me down two career paths – business journalism and financial advice.

The antithesis of that passion, the Lex Luthor if you will, is those who unfairly or unjustly separate people and their money. I hate seeing scams, people being duped or financially taken advantage of.

And I absolutely, positively, blood-boiling, hate, not being offered a fair deal myself.

Naturally, therefore, I have a love-hate relationship with my bank. Am I Robinson Crusoe? I think not! Hands up who hates their bank? Who puts up with their bank because leaving is too hard? Who would love to SCREW SOMETHING FROM THEIR BANK?

Crikey! The impossible! I’ve just united the country!

“You and your bank” is a universal love-hate relationship. Can’t live with them. Can’t vaporise them.

You can’t escape banks. Even if you’ve dropped out of society like a hardened ’60s hippie, you still need a bank account. Centrelink won’t give you cash no more.

And banks make themselves so easy to hate. After a decade of closing branches and sacking staff in the 90s, they turned to fee gouging and, even more recently, interest rate rises that bear no resemblance to RBA rate changes.

Well, here’s how I recently evened the score. A little. And you can do it too. In fact, if you have a mortgage, you must.

Following a recent altercation with my bank, I was furious. I vented. I sprained a spleen. I don’t think I used any expletives or blasphemed, but I was pretty, um, passionate, so I’d be foolish to deny it.

I demanded to speak to a manager. The manager backed up his staffer. Unsated, I declared “this is the end. I’d like some payout figures for my loans, please. Your competitors are offering bigger discounts”.

The manager, calm as Mick Malthouse on a good day, said that he would get someone to call me. I wasn’t going to hold my breath.

But a “retention unit” manager did call. As of that phone call, my rates would be dropped by 0.24 per cent. Simple as that, I’d just scored a Reserve Bank rate cut, without RBA governor Glenn Stevens saying anything.

And the best bit? It comes straight off the bank’s bottom line. All I had to do was mention competitors.

Afterwards, I spoke to John, a mortgage broking mate.

Standard practice, John said. Competition is fierce and banks are desperate to retain customers, particularly good ones. (As you’d expect, Debt Man is a reasonable-sized customer.)

“All you have to do to the Blue Bank is say that you’ve spoken to Yellow Bank and the Red Bank. They’ll drop their rates on the spot,” John said.

“And if you mention the Deathstar, who is annoying them all at the moment, you might even do better.”

So, if you’ve been with your bank for a while … and your discount hasn’t increased … and you haven’t been a naughty boy … you probably don’t even need to call a mortgage broker.

Just call your bank. Make some noise about “better rates elsewhere”. Ask for a “payout figure”. You’ll probably be amazed at how quickly a “retention officer” will call.

And your 0.6 cent discount might become a 0.8 per cent discount. Or, perhaps, better. On a $400,000 home loan, a 0.24 per cent cut in your interest rate equates to approximately $960 a year in saved interest.

Banks love lazy customers. If you never ask, or threaten to leave, you’ll never get your rate reduced.

You need to make the threat and be prepared to follow through.

In the love-hate relationship with my bank, at least the scales have been evened a little.

Bruce Brammall is the author of Debt Man Walking (www.debtman.com.au) and a licensed financial adviser. bruce@debtman.com.au .