We all hate them, yet some of us continue to pay £100′s each month for excess overdrafts, late fees, unpaid direct debits etc. The bigger the bank, the less your chances of satisfaction when something goes wrong or you are looking for help. A big bank simply doesn’t need your business enough to waste time trying to figure out how they messed up and made you pay for their mistake. It’s much easier to ignore you and lose you than if they were a smaller bank. If you are counting on flexibility and the ability to make contact with human beings who actually work inside the bank that made a mistake, then avoid the banking behemoths and stick with a regional bank.

Ultimately, your bank will simply consider you to be an account number, not an individual and any favours they may have extended in the past will certainly not occur again when they realise you are unable to meet your monthly payments. Remember all decisions regarding your account are made by head office rather than your local branch. When you open up a checking account, be sure to ask specific questions and get specific answers in regard to overdraft charges. Inquire about things like overdraft charging fee amounts, electronic monitoring of your checking account and notification from the bank if your account does become overdrawn and whether the bank offers the option of allowing you to deposit money to avoid bouncing a check. If the bank does offer the latter option, be sure to ask about deadlines.

If you regularly miss repayments and don’t talk to your lender about your circumstances, your bank could take you to court for non-payment and get a County Court Judgment (CCJ) against you. This will count against you if you apply for credit in any form for the next six years.

Many lenders, such as banks and credit card companies, have agreed with the government to give borrowers 30 days ‘breathing space’ to deal with their debts. You must seek advice from a free advice agency first. You then need to write to your creditors and ask them to hold action for 30 days under the breathing space commitment.

Where does one go for financial advice nowadays? More and more, it seems that decent impartial financial advice isn’t easy to come by – after all, as impartial as people claim to be, quite often you can’t confirm this yourself.

Because of this, the best way to get properly impartial advice is to make as many enquiries as possible yourself. Your bank might tell you that they have a great deal on a loan or a credit card, but you might find that by making enquiries elsewhere, you could get a far better rate or deal on what you want, which is where services like price comparison sites can really play to your advantage.

Just by tapping in a few details and hitting that button, you can view details on a huge number of deals on the product you’re looking for, ranked to be as close as possible to the parameters you set in the first place, and many of which you can apply for directly.

Of course, this is all well and good, but who do you turn to if you don’t know what you want? Well, the advice given to you by your bank can normally steer you in the right direction, just don’t assume that they will be able to offer you the best deal – often they will be able to, due to a special “existing customer rate” or similar (This is often true for loans, as your bank has a greater knowledge over your financial dealings), but quite often it can be worth shopping around – especially in the case of cash ISAs at the moment, where some banks are offering just .05% interest rates and standard savers often offering little over 3% – Which, when you consider that, according to moneysupermarket.com: “A higher rate taxpayer needs an account paying at least 6.17% in order to earn a positive return [on their savings], while someone in the basic taxband needs to be earning at least 4.62%” Means that at the moment, finding the best place for your money is even more important than ever.

There is a lot to be said for carefully considering your financial position, learning about the different options available and then choosing the one most appropriate to you. True enough, this may not be the quickest way, but do you really want to rush into what could be a very important financial decision? moneysupermarket.com can make this decision easier, offering not only detailed price comparison, but a wealth of other information that can help you decide on what product and what type of account is right for you.

HM Revenue and Customs will launch next year, a second campaign in order to get thousands of people to pay taxes on offshore bank accounts.

They will call this the “offshore disclosure facility” and it will target people with offshore accounts in around 300 banks and building societies across the globe.

HMRC’s first campaign last year, was aimed at customers of the main five big high street banks was a success as it raised £450 million from about 45,000 tax payers.

The HMRC have also announced that some tax dodgers it uncovered last year will face prosecution:
“the intention of the new facility will be to provide an opportunity for account holders to inform us of their own accord of any unpaid tax or duties and to settle their debts in a similar way to the original offshore disclosure facility,”

One of the ways the company have tried to encourage people to step forward of their own accord, is that the fines they will face will be limited this way than if they are caught out at a later date.

In theory, the Revenue can charge up to 100% of the unpaid tax. Last year however, the penalty was capped at 10% in order to try and encourage people to confess to tax dodging. This year, the rate is expected to be 20% to 30% of the unpaid tax.

Saffery Champness accounts person, Ronnie Ludwig, has said that this rate is not enough to get people to pay their taxes: “The previous deal was not sufficiently generous to encourage people to come forward, so I anticipate a smaller response this time.”

The Revenue will not reveal how many people it thinks has money hidden in offshore accounts, although, clearly if they are introducing this measure, they are expecting that perhaps tens of thousands of people do have these accounts.

Chas Roy-Chowdhury, from the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA) has said: “The effectiveness of the last campaign seems to have been a bit patchy…there must be some high-value targets the Revenue want to come clean.”

Last year, HMRC flushed out a list of around 400,000 accounts it considered to be suspicious.  Revenue spokesman explained that: “many of the customers for whom HMRC received information had already paid any tax due on funds invested and had nothing to disclose.”

Of the 100,000 people whom the Revenue still considered to be suspicious, 45,000 then came forward and paid between them around £45 million. Around 50,000 others that the Revenue still consider to be suspicious are still being investigated and some will soon be prosecuted.

HMRC said they “made follow-up checks of the disclosures made and has started a programme of checks on those who did not take the opportunity to come forward. In the most serious cases, we are carrying out criminal investigations and we will bring some prosecutions before the courts in the New Year.”

They will write to the latest group of banks and building societies, asking them to reveal the names and addresses of all its UK residents that have offshore accounts, and then write to said residents asking them to pay their unpaid tax.

Some of the confessions to tax dodging last year, included someone who disclosed over £60,000 due to failure to declare income from her holiday home, someone who sold a property portfolio and placed funds in an offshore account and never declared them and faced a £1.7 million fine.

Also, a business man diverted profits of around £1.3 million into a Channel Islands bank account, a plumber who paid £10,000 from informal jobs into an offshore account, and a self-employed man who invested £50,000 inheritance lump sum offshore.

While the authorities have for some time been looking to make the financial industry a lot more transparent, do you really know the full extent of the charges which you incur when you take out a loan, open a bank account or even take out a mortgage?

Even though advisors have been forced to breakdown the charges which you will incur, many seem to do it such a way that it is almost impossible to understand what the final figure is. Do you pay a termination charge if you repay your loan early? What are the penalties for late payment?

Very often it is only when you actually get into the situation that you will realise that not only will you be penalised for missing a loan repayment, but you will also pay further interest on the payment until you actually catch up.  The mortgage market has been the subject of much controversy over the years with many providers using early repayment charges to bump up there profit on your loan.  While this practice is supposed to have been outlawed some time ago, there are still a small number who will penalise you in some shape or form for early repayment.

It is vital that whenever you take out  a loan, mortgage or even a bank account that you know exactly what you are being charged and will be charged in the event of missing payments, etc.  While the banks are making charges available to their customers it is often up to you to find them in the small print, otherwise you may be in for some shocks in the future.