this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2023
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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Debit cards in the UK generally don't let you go overdrawn.

Like if I try to buy something and don't have enough in my account I just get told 'you can't buy this' and have to go transfer some more money to my account.

I pay a £5 monthly fee, but that gets me travel insurance, breakdown cover, mobile phone cover and a bunch of other benefits that I haven't had to use yet.

I could opt out of that £5 fee and not pay anything at all for my banking. I find all the fees you end up with in the US a little bit insane.

[–] Aceticon 1 points 1 year ago

Not really: I once went overdrawn on a Debit card in the UK (because the country doesn't really have its own payments network and uses others such as VISA, which was the one for my card) even though I had verbally agreed with them it would never happen and any such payments would just bounce (as I was used to the banking cards in my home country of Portugal which use a local banking network were no unarranged overdrafts can happen, as it's designed from the ground up as a debit-only network for in person payments), it was an in person payment and I had more than enough money in my savings account.

They charged me £20 for it (if I remember it correctly). I was pissed off enough that I closed my accounts with them and moved banks.

Mind you, this was over 15 years ago.

Considering the amounts that passed through my accounts (and often stayed they for a good while) after that while I lived in the UK, they lost a ton of money by scamming those £20 from me.