The Mysteries of Banking

I don't trust people who study economics, and I don't trust banks. I see both as some kind of necessity, but as I feel it takes a special kind of anal fixation to develop such a close relationship to money as these people do, I keep a distance to them whenever possible. Now for the past months my bank has been behaving in a manner that I find, well, disquieting. They obviously want me to overdraw my bank account.

During my student days, money was scarce, and my bank account was constantly overdrawn. More often than once I received a polite letter from my bank telling me to see a member of staff and talk about my financial situation. That was a rather humiliating and unpleasant experience.

These days, I have a regular income. I don't earn all that much, but my bank account hasn't been overdrawn in a while, and somebody at my bank has apparently started to notice that there's a regular influx of money every month. Perhaps they also noticed that I haven't been paying them any debit interest for some time now and they actually have to pay me interest (at a ridiculously low rate, though).

Anyway, a year or so ago I started getting notifications from my bank that my overdraft limit had been raised; not that I really needed it. At first I found this reassuring, a nice change from the humiliating visits of earlier days. Then, every two or three months I would get another notification that my overdraft limit had been raised further, until at some point it reached a level than I found no longer reassuring, but actually quite obscene.

Then yesterday, there was a letter from my bank in my mailbox. Inside I found a promotional brochure: "Ihre EinkaufsReserve" ("EinkaufsReserve" is German EuphemismSpeak for "overdraft"). The brochure was, more or less, intended to convince me to overdraw my bank account. It told me how great it was to be able to spend any amount of money I wanted - even if I didn't have it - and how the "EinkaufsReserve" would gladly solve all my (temporary) financial problems.

Point #1: I'm not stupid. If I really need money, I take a bank loan. Interest rates are much lower on loans than on overdrafts. That is particularly true in the case of the obscenely high overdraft limit that they are granting me at the moment.

Point #2: I don't need it. Okay, I don't earn a lot, but I don't it, and they know that. I'm dead sure that if I needed money, they (a) wouldn't be giving me obscene overdraft limits and (b) wouldn't send me brochures advertising their "EinkaufsReserve", but (c) they would instead most certainly invite me to more of those humiliating visits at their bank.

With the amount of people who are in debt in Austria at the moment (every third household, according to this parliamentary report), how stupid do they think I am, and how stupid are they to think I want to spend the rest of my life working for them?

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Horst Prillinger's views are his and his only. If you have a problem with them, please contact him and talk it over with him before complaining to somebody else. Thank you.