I recently revceived two letters from the Bank of Scotland both of which informed me of the same changes to be applied to seperate accounts.

The title read thus; “Important news about changes to your Bank of Scotland Current account” it should have read something like this; “We have thought of a new way to screw more money out of you”

The changes are to the overdraft fees. Bank of Scotland are no longer charging a debit interest rate but will be charging a pound a day for every day you are in your overdraft (for overdrafts upto £2,500)! At the moment I am charged around £12-13 per month for being in my overdraft all month, with the new system I will be charged more than double that at around £30!

What really yanks my noodle is the robbing bastards are trying to make it sound like they are doing me a favour by saying; “At Bank of Scotland we’re committed to fees that are clear and simple to understand”.

So not only are they trying to pull the wool over my eyes, pretending to do me a favour but they are insulting my intelligence by saying I cant comprehend a simple interest rate and it must be simplified for me!!!

These new overdraft charges I feel are purposely made to penalise people like me, who live in their overdrafts, the very people who are probably struggling to cope financially and should be aided not made worse off. Yet again the banks find away to penalise the poorer ranks of society.

Of course all Banks will be looking for ways to wangle that little bit extra from everybody after their almighty f*&^ up. They screw up, losing billions of pounds, we the tax payer foot the bill and we are thanked by increased charges masked with PR smoke blown out these jumped up bankers arses! And what can we do……not much really, change your bank maybe? Well they are all just as bad. Phone them up and complain maybe? Hah…if you can be bothered waiting 20 mins on the phone to do it! No there isnt much that can be done which is so frustrating, just write a rant on a blog nobody cares about.

Bank of Scotland a friend for life? Aye right

My letter from was from Mike Regnier, Director, Personal Current Accounts.

Well all I can say Mr Regnier is if this was your idea I hope you sleep well at night with the knowledge that you are robbing the damn people that have bailed you out and keep you in business and your slippery mitts quaffing champagne.

UPDATE:
Well I have spoken with my feet. After banking with Bank of Scotland my whole ‘banking’ life I have now transfered all my accounts over to Alliance and Leicester aka Santander. They offered me 0% interest on my overdrafts for 1 year and there after the charge 50p a day for being in your overdraft with a cap of £5 per month (this is even less than the interest charged on my overdraft by HBOS BOS). Also they do not charge for the simple use of having a business bank account. Indeed I have always found this strange that banks feel the need to take a cut of every process that happens in a business account…..doesnt seem fare, aparantly Santander think so too.

My sister too feels put out by Bank of Scotland and she has transfered to Alliance and Leicester. Alliance and Leicester also offer a referral insentive. If you refer somebody and they take up their current account then £25 each will be your reward.

So I hope that any Bank of Scotland customers reading this speak with their feet and jump ship for a better deal. Dont stand for their shoddy new charges. Please do not feel “loyalty” to them…they havent to you! After all its business! And they just arent running theirs very well so try somewhere else.

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Well Im sure Im not the only one but my listing has disappeared in Google Local Search results.

Ive got quite a few businesses listed but only one ever got displayed for some reason? The listing that appeared was for the key term “Web Design Perth” and my website www.webdesign-perth.co.uk was the one displayed (although I have two others business websites listed which dont appear?) before I added this one it was www.thepathwebdesign.com that was displayed. It had been displayed no problem for over 1 year in a prominent position.

I recently added another business to my Local Business Centre account and now nothing shows up. No listings are displayed anywhere in the local results!!

Because I am no listed prominently in the proper organic listings I rely on the local results to get a bit of traffic! I dont think anything I have done anything that would cause this to happen but if anybody has any ideas why my listings have been dropped please use the comment form below and share.

I have noticed that there has been some recent Algorithm changes and now Google has introduced ‘Place Pages’ which display more information on the buisiness and take away the need for the user to actually visit the website, I think this will detriment the businesses and web designers. The business will suffer because the user might not visit the website to get the latest info and deals, plus if you run Google Adsense then this could reduce your revenue (and Googles, although it will offset because more people are staying on Google and clicking as they go). Obviously web designers will lose out because business owners will say why do I need the expense of a site when Google lists me front page with all the information I need. So now its an even harder task to talk them around as to why its a good thing, and it is!

Well Im a bit pissed off anyway, if Google are going to drop my sites from Local search the least they could do is put them on page one for the key terms I want……where is Google CEO’s phone number again…phone him and get him to sort it personally for me…

Any thought about anything above anyone?

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If you receive a cold call from Creditsafe (ASA Creditsafe – www.creditsafeuk.com) or their sister company Marketsafe (www.marketsafeuk.com) please just say you are not interested and hang up the phone. If you let them speak the salesperson will aggressively sell you their services for the “low” price of £800, you can however haggle them down to £150 if you show complete disinterest! Thats a good deal I hear you cry, well no think about it. What does it tell you about them as a business and the service the offer if they devalue it so quickly? Plus if they can sell it at £150 then thats what they should do instead of ripping people off that pay £800.

Now if they create an account for you (or you do it) and they phone you to take you through the login process, do not do it! They will tell you just to click their terms and conditions confirming you have read them, this means you have entered into a contract with them. If you decide from this point that you do not want their service they will send you threatening letters and take you to court, stating that you have digitally signed and entered into a contract with them.

So please do not log into their system and agree to terms and conditions.

Creditsafe and Marketsafe operate an “easy in, hard out” style contract, its easy to agree to it and difficult to get out of. There are loads of cases online about their “auto renew” policy. Basically if you do not write to them explaining you wish to opt out of their auto renew system they will just go ahead and charge you for the next years service. It has been documented on a number of forums online that the company will sometimes increase the renewal cost by up to 10 times what was paid in the first year! Scary.

Check out the thread about Creditsafe/Marketsafe on money saving expert’s forum here: Money Saving Expert Forum

The service they offer isnt even that great, you can achieve a similar service yourself for free, its called Yell.com! You can find just as many business contact/leads by searching Yell.com (for free) as you can with Credit Safe! The Credit Safe database is also innaccurate as its supposedly tells you if a business has a website through their system, as a web designer I thought this would be useful but upon cross checking their database with my own searches online I found that the seriously need to update their database!!

Anyway I cant recommend enough you STAY AWAY FROM THESE COMPANIES! It will only cause you stress, if you are interested in their services perhaps look at their competition or look for free ways to achieve the service!

Creditsafe and Marketsafe suck and sail close to the winds of being a scam, using bully tactics to sell and retrieve funds.

Please feel free to comment below and share your experiences with the company! I have no doubt most will be complaints but Im sure the Creditsafe staff will be on saying how great they are as they do on every other blog and forum Ive seen. Check out the links below in one of my comments to see other peoples complaints. Definitely a company to avoid, just dont put yourself through the hassle.

Just to alert people also here are some numbers they may call you from: 08708500660, 07772 393720, 029 20 855175

These numbers may have changed by now and they do withold their number to. If one of the above numbers calls you do yourself a HUGE favour…dont answer. Or better yet tell them to get lost as you have read Effutios review!!

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OK that’s it Ive finally had enough! This rant has been brewing and indeed people closest to me have had to endure it consistently up until this point. So hopefully this will get it all off my chest never to be spoken of again (mmm doubtful). As you can see I have also vented my frustrations on the Twitter bird…ahhh makes me feel a little better.

Twitter………..what a complete load of pants that’s been jumped on by every celeb with a PC and no common sense. I mean come on what real use is Twitter providing apart from keeping the sad celeb chasing stalkers updated with the next piece of uninteresting news, take P Diddy (IAMDIDDY) for instance when he says: “let’s go! Let’s go! Let’s go! Let’s go!!!!!!!”

Wow….deep. And hes not the only one writing pointless rubbish cluttering up Twitters nice website that surely no sane person cares about. Nope your every day Jo is writing crap too like; “brushing my teeth” while part of me wants to applaud their multi-tasking skills, the other wants to wrench the brush from their tweet typing grasp and ram it down their throat in a heroic attempt to get rid of the crap spewing forth onto Twitter!

Twitter is producing the human equivalent of static noise; a perpetual stream of annoying noise that makes no sense!

OK, OK maybe some people have got some interesting things to say but how much good stuff can you cram into 140 characters? So what real use does Twitter serve? I mean it only became popular once ‘celebrities’ started using and talking about it! Of course its good to have an outlet to keep people updated about gigs, events, thoughts etc its called a blog! Where one can choose to write more than 140 characters if one cares too (what forward thinking). Hurrah!

But to the real crux of the matter; why oh why is everyone yapping on and on and on and on about it! Its a never ending stream of Twitter this and Twitter that, with everyone jumping on the band wagon. People talk about it on the radio, on the TV, its in the news, I get 10 bloody articles about it in my email everyday! WHY? Its just not that great! It hasnt brought any real good or usefulness to the world. So please here my plea stop talking about it so much and let Twitter die its enivitable death sooner rather than later!

Microblogging on a Twitter-like scale is the scurge of the internet and a complete waste of web space. RIP Twitter Bird

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Why do we (I suppose more so the media) build people up to a God like status then shoot them down……the answer is of course money. That’s what sells papers, magazines and what makes news sites and blogs popular.

But who’s fault is it? The media wouldn’t publish the stuff if the general public were not lapping it up. So surely we can not blame the media for supplying the masses with information they want to read, hear and watch! Perhaps over the years we have been groomed to accept and even look for this type of information but I think the blame has to come down firmly at the feet of the multitude of brain dead people who’s lives are so sad they have to acquire information about ‘famous’ peoples lives. Whether it be reading the new style mags, tabloid papers or watching the ever increasing ‘celeb reality TV shows’.

We have become a society that is constantly obsessing about the other person grass being greener instead of working on our own lawn and being contented with it! This leads to jealousy of others and then joy when the media eventually divulges that these so called celebs are just as imperfect as everyone else….and if they cant find such stories they will simply make them up.

Seriously why waste your time being jealous and obsessively reading shite about people until eventually you can get on your high horse and say ‘Oh well I knew they were no good’ and secretly think ‘Yeh I’m just as good if not better than them’. If people like this put half as much time, effort and thought into life as they do collecting media garbage about celebs then maybe they could achieve great things and this country (the UK) would see a revival of forward thinkers, entrepreneurs and inventors.

 

Im really sick to death with all the crap that spews forth from the various medias and the useless plebs that suck it up happily and then regurgitate it to their equally brain dead friends.

This post has of course been inspired by the recent death of Michael Jackson but has been a ranting topic for me for a while. The media built the poor guy up and applied as much pressure as possible, of course the cracks will show……anybody would crack up with that kind of pressure and attention.

Why cant we all just be happy with the genius-like music he created, why do we need to know his favourite meal, colour, where he goes shopping, etc. I mean this guy was hounded constantly; a camera in his face 24/7. No break no let up. Why? Cause the media exploit anyone they can to make a buck and people suck it up because they are lazy and wish they had the talent and money of others instead of working for it. Sad!

Well now the effect of all the pressure is evident.

Who’s to blame for Michael Jacksons death? Society!