*sigh*

Ok, here’s a rant that everybody will probably relate to no matter where you live in the world, and considering I’m only twenty three years old (twenty four in a month today if you want to donate money to me for my birthday, hint hint) even I find the next statement quite funny, but isn’t everything expensive these days?

Yeah I did mention my age as an excuse to plug my birthday but also to point out that I’m still relatively young and yet I can remember back when things were so much cheaper. And obviously since I’m bitter and twisted I tend to blame all the problems on various things – mostly America – but still it’s in my mind a rant that needs to be stated.

A few months ago I signed up for a business account at HSBC because I had an idea for a business that never really went anywhere mostly due to the fact that it cost too much to advertise, and this is a problem that my mum is currently experiencing in her business. She has a wonderful small Oven cleaning business that was doing relatively well back when she could afford to advertise but with everybody’s mortgage costs and electricity and gas bills going up and the general cost of living going through the roof in the last few months it’s harder and harder for people to spend money on things like getting their oven cleaned, even though in reality it’s something that they really should do and nobody actually wants to bother with. And having been her assistant for a while I know that things like Mr Muscle do serious damage to the ovens compared to getting them professionally cleaned and no matter how hard you work with Mr Muscle it’ll never come out as good as it would getting it cleaned, but people can’t afford it.

As a result of the current economic climate she’s had to drop her prices to get more customers, and this has meant that she’s making less money now for two different reasons – less customers and less money from each customer – which means she can’t afford to advertise as much anymore which in turn means less exposure, which means even less customers… and it’s a really nasty and vicious circle. The HSBC Business Account thing triggered this because they’ve put their Business Account cost up from £3 to £3.15 a month. Not much of an increase but an increase nonetheless. Luckily both her and I get our business accounts free until 2010, which is mostly why I even still have mine since I’d have cancelled it by now considering I pay no money at all in to it, but just an increase of a few pence just adds to the cost of absolutely everything costing more.

I heard on the radio yesterday as well that the banks were increasing the interest rates for mortgages again, making it even more difficult for people to afford to pay their mortgages. Now the people who were barely able to afford them before are all losing their houses because the banks keep raising the prices and pricing them right out of their homes, and then because all these people are losing their homes the banks are losing money on people being declared bankrupt, and their response is to increase the interest rates and making everybody else suffer – isn’t this counterproductive though? Shouldn’t they REDUCE their costs because people can’t afford to meet them so that people can keep paying their mortgages and in turn they lose less money on people’s homes being repossessed?

To me that’s just basic logic, but in the business world there is apparently no room for logic. That’s the same with electricity and gas companies putting their prices up, which people can’t afford to pay. It makes me genuinely sick that companies like this who provide a service that in the modern world you simply can’t live without can charge you pretty much whatever they want to. It’s not like you can boycott them because how can you live without electricity? Cooking everything on a barbeque and gathering around the fire at night to stay warm? Play card games by candlelight because you can’t watch television or turn on the lights? It’s sickening to me, it really is. Meanwhile they’re making BILLIONS off of our misery.

And to make things even worse for my mother, her mobile phone bill attempted to come out yesterday, which she needs for her business. The bill was £39.07; she had £39.02 in her account. The bank refused to pay it and now say she owes them £30. So they’ve charged her £30 for not having £0.05 more, so they’ve effectively charged her SIX THOUSAND times the amount that she needed. Nice, huh?

So I had an idea. I seriously want to start some kind of movement that will go down to the bank on the day that you get paid and remove ABSOLUTELY EVERY PENNY out of the account, leaving you with a balance of £0.00, and take all the money home and phone up all the companies that you would normally pay telling them that you’ll send them something like money orders you can purchase at the post office instead or asking them to send you a bill that you can pay across the counter just so that the banks realise that effectively we don’t NEED them at all, there are other ways of paying bills without them. That way hopefully they’d realise that they can’t get away with the bullshit that they put us through, and that attempting to charge me £63 for being less than £8 overdrawn, or charging my mother £30 for being 5p overdrawn, is just not on.

The problem is that this message won’t be read by enough people. So I had a new plan and it involved running for mayor and then making a proclamation to the entire town that basically we were sick of dealing with this bullshit. I seriously think it’s time that we revolt against those who think that they have power over us controlling every aspect of our lives.

Of course it’ll never happen. People may be desperately unhappy in the current world but nobody seems willing to change it, and nobody will listen to some student who thinks he has all the answers (even though I genuinely DO think I have all the answers, and if I don’t then I know people who can help me think of them). So I may be one sexy, sexy man with my new goatee and all but dammit I am just one man up against the machine, and as much as Hollywood may love to tell you differently one man really can’t make a difference.

So now we’re back to my original statement that started off this whole thing:

*sigh*

On the bright side, Kevin (if you’re reading this), thanks for the help today. I’m overflowing with ideas for my University project now!

Until next time true believers…

That is all.

Why is it that whenever one thing goes right three more things seems to go wrong? I genuinely and completely hate life at the moment and will either a) soon become infamous for going on a murdering spree and basically killing everybody who’s pissed me off recently or b) be in the newspaper for killing myself.

And no, it’s not lost on me how I went from so happy to so depressed in such a short period. Whenever one thing in my life goes well enough to make me happy the universe immediately begins work to balance itself out by kicking the shit out of me, metaphorically, until I’m depressed again.

Yep, things are great. I hate everyone. Including you!

That is all.

I know how concerned you all were with my financial problems and your outpour of support was touching.

Wait, what support?

Still I figured I’d follow up on my previous post just to inform you all that not only did Halifax wipe off the £63 worth of charges, which I am most grateful for – even though I stand by the fact that charging that much for being overdrawn by so small an amount is ludicrous – but today I finally got a letter from Canterbury Christ Church University confirming my place there, so a big thank you to them as well, and got my student account sorted in HSBC, so starting tomorrow I shouldn’t be broke as fuck anymore.

Exciting, no? That means I can afford basic things like food again! AMAZING!!

This is truly an exciting period in my life, and with Uni starting again it seems on September 29th it seems everything is going well. Plus I got my exercise bike back as well so I’ll be doing some exercise regularly as well now, so soon I’ll be so damn sexy that I’ll have a different woman every night. Or something like that anyway.

Yep, fear my awesomeness.

That is all.

They say it makes the world go round, and they might just be right. I managed to accidentally go £7.14 over my overdraft a few days ago because I totally forgot I had a payment that was due to come out, and stupidly enough it’s for something I don’t even use on a regular basis anymore and should probably just cancel. But my banks response to this was to tell me that they’re charging me £35 because I went over my overdraft, and a further £28 for being over my overdraft.

Now personally I see those as the same fucking thing. If I go over it then yes, I’m over it. Why are they charging me twice for this? And more importantly why are they charging me £63 for being over my overdraft by £7.14? How does that seem even REMOTELY fair?

So I’ve been reading up online about bank charges and how there’s a case in the courts at the moment that will hopefully make it completely illegal for them to charge such insane amounts of money, but that there’s fuck all you can do to get your money back until the case is settled (which the banks will just delay continuously and then appeal a thousand times of course) unless you’re in financial difficulty.

My theory is, I’m a student without a job who’s just gone over his overdraft because he can’t afford to pay shit. That makes me in financial difficulty, right? I mean I think that’s a pretty clear case.

So tomorrow I’m marching down to my bank to tell them that no, I won’t be paying £63 in completely insanely overpriced charges and that in the past they’ve charged me £78 for a mistake at the University where the University tried to take my fees twice by accident and I didn’t have two lots of £400 in my account, so my bank paid one lot of £400 and then charged me £78 for bouncing the second one back. And while that was 19 months ago I’ve read today that you can claim back fees up to six years in the past, so I shall be claiming that back as well.

So hopefully I’ll go from having no money at all today to having £78 tomorrow, and if not and they still insist on charging me then I shall just refuse to pay any money in to that account, move all my direct debits over to my student account and just let them keep charging me and charging me and charging me and when they eventually take me to court I shall tell this story to the nice judge and watch him (or her) tell the bank to take a very long walk off a very short cliff.

So yeah, I’m fighting the power. And oddly had they not tried to charge me £63 I was willing to let the £78 old charge go, but now they’ve pushed me I’m pushing back.

On a related note, I’m poor. I don’t think this is news to anybody here, but if anybody wants to be my BFF they can do so by clicking the link below and making a donation to making me less poor.

http://www.peteebdon.com/donate.php

Not going to work? Didn’t think so but I figured it was worth a shot…

That is all.