You’re supposedly not happy with me. I’ve got a lot of debt, that I’ve been struggling to cope with. You have repeatedly pointed this out to me, in no uncertain terms. Now I’m functioning & employed, I’m now slowly but steadily crawling towards the zero mark.
So please, please, stop telling your cashiers to offer personal loans every fucking time I pay something in! I want less debt, not more!!
The reason they are pushing their loans on you is contained in your OP:
If everybody did that, they would be out of business. The ideal customer is someone who carries loads of debt and makes the minimum payment.
Nope - if every customer was in credit, on a measly 0.5% interest rate, they can happily make thumping profits investing that money.
Elucidate.
1000 customers, each with £1000 savings, each receiving 0.5% interest. The bank now has £1m to invest in whatever way it sees fit, and will get a return many times greater than 0.5%.
But in any case, the bank has told me they want me to clear my debts - but their smiling robots are still instructed to try and sell more of them to everyone.
Versus 1000 customers with £1000 personal loans at 12-19% making payments that barely cover the finance charges? The bank makes more off the relatively safe personal loans than more risky investments.
I’m sure you know this, but for those that don’t yet because they’re either too young or don’t carry much debt, here’s the scam.
When you’re struggling to pay your bills because of un/under-employment, illness, whatever, you realize how important a good credit score is, so you really sacrifice and do without to try to climb out of debt. When you do get back on your feet and start making progress, not only does the bank want to make sure they get more of it, but they’re counting on human desire for stuff to keep taking on more and more debt.
If one does this and keeps making the payments, the bank is making that much more money. If you default, it’s hardly enough with personal accounts to really hurt the bank. But then you have a REALLY big hill to climb. And guess which place is least likely to give you money when you need it? Yup.
Good luck GorillaMan. You didn’t get that far into debt overnight and all that .
As far as I can work out, the credit-rating system in Britain is the opposite of that in America. Here, you start with a ‘good’ rating, and so can be offered all sorts of stuff once you turn 18. Only once you clock up defaults, bounced cheques and whatever, do you start losing points on your rating.
In any case, given my recent situation & rating, if I made an application for a loan or a credit card to any other company, I’d be told where to go. But my own bank, who should know my financial situation better, still have a computer system that flags me up as “sell him personal loans!” whenever the cashier enters my account number. (BTW, it is really obvious that they’re making these offers according to what’s presented to them on their terminals.)