The trials and tribulations of a life of leisure...

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Thursday, October 09, 2008

Icesave Meltdown

I, like thousands of other people, am waiting to see what is happening to Icesave. 

Paul and I had been very sensible in ensuring that we had not put more than the 'safe' 35000 (now upped to 50000) in any one institution, and I had a one-year fixed rate bond with the aforementioned ex-bank. This is not due to end until February. According to the BBC website it looks as if ING is taking over my account if the deal goes through. 

I will await my welcome letter to put next to the one I have from Santander for my Bradford and Bingley account.

The recent troubled times have seen our pension funds plummet. Luckily for us we still have a long time to go before we need them so hopefully they can recover. We may now need to die quite a few years before his optimistic 90...

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

If one is prepared to invest in a foreign bank and reap the good times, they should not expect any help from UK when all goes sour. Also the Icelandic guarantee was for a lot less than that of the UK. So that was known at the time of entering into the ageement. The government should be looking for ways of recouping the profits made by the stock exchange fat cats and also punishing those in the banking system who gambled with OUR money.Brown had his finger on the pulse during his term as COTE. To no avail. What's new !! The only cure is strip them of their ill gained assets,but it will never happen.

Hels said...

It is true that the Icelandic guarantee was for the first 20000 Euros, which they may be defaulting on. The remainder (up to 35000 pounds at the time) was guaranteed by the UK. I would not have put any money in if it was not fully covered.
As I said we were careful in spreading our savings between different institutions to ensure that it was all covered. Whether the government should now be bailing out people who did not follow this policy is another matter.

Anonymous said...

Unfortunately the banks are consolidating faster than we can keep up! We'd just started moving cash into ING when it took over our Kaupthing account. Now we have to start moving around again...

and given UK banks have just been ranked behind Botswana's, I don't think 'foreign' is necessarily bad. Although with hindsight Icelandic was a mistake...

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