The bank owes me money and that's a Bad Thing

Hooray for online banking. Because it lets you know something has gone horribly wrong sooner. It doesn’t make any more sense than snail-mail banking, though.

This is a story of credit cards, and why people don’t understand numbers.

I, like many people, have a credit card. In fact, I have three. I got my second only because I was working with credit cards as part of my work, and we were having problems with a particular company, and I thought it would help if I had one of those cards as well. (I was wrong.) I got my third when I decided that if I was going to bank with an Internet bank, I wasn’t going to give my money to spammers.

(There’s my googlebomb for the day - or, given how little traffic this site gets, I should say my googlehailstone.)

A while ago, I was looking at credit card bills, and thinking that maybe I should do something about them, and an even more recent while ago, I finally decided to do something about them, and actually looked at my credit cards, and realised that one was cheaper than the other. And that the money I owed was on the expensive one.

(When I said I worked with credit cards, I meant as a computer guy who was trying to understand how they worked, rather than a financial whizz-kid who knew how to make numbers dance. Obviously, very little of the banking stuff actually rubbed off.)

Anyway, my credit cards clearly made little sense, so I decided to transfer money from one card to the other. I phoned up my expensive bank’s push-button system, said I wanted to do a balance transfer from one card to another, said how much, which card, and they said it would take 7-10 working days. That’s OK, I can wait.

I checked up just now, to see if the money had gone through. It had. In the wrong way. Rather than balancing off debts, my expensive bank sent money - that I didn’t have - and sent it to my cheaper bank, whose card I pay off every month.

Well, these things happen when you’re dealing with negative money. But, frankly, 7 to 10 working days - to get it wrong - is ridiculous when ordinary credit card transactions take 3 days, tops. I could go to a bank and withdraw money from one card and put it into the other one, and it would be perfectly clear what I was doing, and it would be quicker. Hell, given that I have access to my company’s merchant account, I could do it right here, right now. (Note: I haven’t, because this isn’t company business.)

That’s not the silliest thing, though.

The point of a credit card is that you can owe money to your bank. You’ve got a credit limit, and as long as you’re lower than that, you’re fine.

What happens when, for some reason - like, say, you’ve given money to a bank rather than withdrawn it - you end up in the situation where the bank owes you money? Well, that’s a bizarre situation, and certainly deserves to have your attention drawn to it.

But in this fashion?

Negative, and red, in currency terms, means, to me, that something is wrong.

There is absolutely nothing wrong, in itself, with your bank owing you money. But, apparently, my bank’s website disagrees.