Ever wonder about the ethics of banking? That's easy - it doesn't have any. Not a one. Without exception, banks are the scaliest, scummiest operators on the planet. Think a bunch of Ferengi in a feeding frenzy - and that's an insult to the Ferengi!
So you have a savings account - and say you leave money in that account and don't deposit or withdraw anything from it - do you know what will happen? Go back in a couple of months and check.
Will the amount you left in there be more? Or less?
What do you thing?
I can guarantee you it will be less.
You see, banks don't pay you to keep your money (and use it to generate interest for themselves) anymore. YOU have to pay THEM. That's right - you're lending them your money to make money for themselves, and paying them to do it.
Can someone please make this make sense?
If a loan-shark did that, they'd be bust within a week. But banks expect you to do that unconditionally?
The myth of "bank charges" has applied to "customers" since roughly the end of the 1980s in this country. If memory serves, that all started with the introduction of ATMs and having to pay for a bank card (to use at the ATMs naturally). So it's card fees, service fees, handling fees and the like - and they literally nickel and dime you to death.
Up until that time, banks in South Africa - and there were a lot of them until that big horrific merger in the early 1990s that created the truly kakkest bank in South Africa (ABSA) - used to pay interest on ordinary savings accounts, and if there were ANY charges or fees at all, they were conducted in a way that resulted in your balance actually growing instead of shrinking over time, even while inactive.
That meant that you were actually able to SAVE using a SAVINGS account. You could literally open a savings account, stick money in it, and leave it there to grow.
Oh, today they will tell you, you still can. They still pay you "interest" on the money in your account - BUT that tends to work out to far less than the service fee bullshit they hit you with. In my case, I'm with Capitec (jokingly referred to as "Crapitec", but not without a degree of good reason) the amount of "interest" earned each month comes to much less than my "service fees" and other charges combined.
So basically, if I were to leave money in my account and not put anything in or take anything out, it would deplete gradually to the point where I would end up OWING them for "administration fees" for managing an empty account. How much work is involved in "managing" an account that already exists? Especially since I can guaran-damn-tee you that account is entirely "managed" by a computer somewhere? The same is true for my wife's account at FNB. She's unemployed, but still has that bank account from the days when she still had a job before moving here in 2016, and it's the only bank in this country that works with PayPal. I frequently have to "top it up" to make up for the "service fees" so that whenever money comes in from PayPal, it doesn't get swallowed up by bank charges just from having the fucking account in the first place.
Incidentally, I have nothing flattering to say to anyone who tries to sell me the fairytale that FNB is the best bank in South Africa, so rather don't. Just don't.
How do banks make money? Traditionally speaking, they used to put the money they kept for their clients to work for them - investing in various schemes and deals and projects that they believed would generate more money, which they would put back into the business. This would result in larger returns for THEM - which they would pass on as a percentage to their clients.
Now I'm not even talking about actual investments here - like the staid "32 day notice" accounts and the like - I'm just focusing on basic savings accounts at this point.
They didn't charge "service fees" to their clients - because the money they put in their bank accounts were a resource to THEM. The more people banked with them, the more the bank could invest - and the more profit they could generate using that global amount of money.
So today, nothing is free - not even lending your money to a bank to do with as it pleases.
This brings up a memory - please indulge me a moment while I dredge up an annecdote:
Many years ago, I went to the army - the South African Army to be exact - as an involunteer, and my very first "payday" was in February of 1992. I was just freshly 18 years old, and received something like R200 if memory serves, give or take a few cents here or there. Since it was my first payday, they hadn't processed my bank account details yet, so my salary was paid out in cash at a table standing at the head of a very long line of raw new recruits. When I got to the front, I was handed my little envelope containing R200 (a pittance even back then) in small bills. That was considerate of them, I thought - I wouldn't need to look for change or to break larger notes if I needed to buy something at the canteen etc. Little did I realize, it was to make the next stage easier for themselves.
Envelope in hand, I was ushered to the next table, where I had to hand over R50 for mess fees. Great, not only was I forced to be there as a conscript, but I was then expected to pay for the privilege as well. But it didn't end there - I was ushered to the next table, where I had to hand over another R50 for "Regimental fund", whatever that was. The next table demanded R20 contribution towards the RSM's birthday present - whoever the hell he was - and on it went, until I was left with something like R20 and a handful of receipts - with which I was expected to last the rest of the month on - 30 days until the next payday. If it weren't for my mom sending me a little money in the post, I'd've been completely fucked.
How they expected anyone to subsist on R200 a month in those days (whilst also screwing the shit out of them with charges so that almost nothing was left of it) is anyone's guess.
The moral of that little story is to illustrate just how little "the system" cares for us as individuals. As far as they're concerned, they're paying you, so they don't owe you shit and you have no reason to complain. If you can't manage your money properly, that's your problem, not theirs. If you don't like it, you can leave - but you can't leave, because you can't afford to, or because you simply just can't. The point is to make you utterly dependent on that system, even if it barely pays you a living wage.
In 2013 I closed my account at ABSA (for a long list of reasons covered in previous articles) and moved my salary account to Crapitec. The benefits that persuaded me to do so were the ridiculously high bank charges - at the time my debit order fees were on the order of around R240 per month. At Crapitec those same monthly debit orders cost me much less - only R24 per month - 10% of what ABSA had been charging me. Yes, it had increased slightly over the last decade or so, but it's still far less than I'd have paid at ABSA, and I've no doubt it's still less than what I'd be paying now if I'd stayed - even with fewer debit orders.
Additionally, my new bank also gives me monthly "interest" paid back into my account, as I'm sure most banks still do. Unfortunately, this "payment" basically reflects just a sort of rebate on their bank charges, service fees and the like. For example, in November, their combined charges (including monthly account admin fee R7.50, R17.50 debit order fees, R2 "external payment" fee, R0.70 SMS notifications, and ATM withdrawal fees R20.00) came to R47.70. But yeah, they "paid" me a whopping R6.00 in "interest". Woohoo - don't spend it all at once, okay?
Even if I had no debit orders on my account, and even if I didn't use it for anything other than "saving" with a balance in it, I would still get charged R7.50 for "monthly admin" - and get paid less than that (R6.00) in "interest". My balance would decrease, not increase.
So exactly how is a "savings account" a "savings account" these days? Answer - it isn't. It's just a name, carefully crafted to make you think something positive about their shitty service and their shitty system. It's a fucking scam.
Do these people actually think we're all dumb enough to believe the shit they're peddling? Well, some of you might be, but I'm not. Er, not that it makes much difference, because you simply can't exist in this society they created without having a bank account these days.
You HAVE to have a bank account, and you HAVE to pay to have that bank account.
Why? Because without a bank account, your employer won't pay you, the government won't be able to track your earnings or your spending for tax purposes - and the list goes on.
To sum up: unless you're wealthy, a bank account doesn't save you money or generate money for you, it COSTS you money. But you can't not have one. Think about that the next time you flash your "gold" debit card or credit card at the till. (Don't even get me started on the scam that is credit cards!)
To provide you with yet another depressing example, I haven't been able to actually SAVE since before 2013. Not a centime. I simply can't afford to.
Back in the early 2000s, up to about 2005, it was easier to save. Maybe that's an understatement - unlike today, it was still POSSIBLE to save. There were high bank interest rates of around 12%, so money built up quickly - a factor I used well while saving up for my surgery in January 2006. But the wall-street crash of 2008 changed that, seemingly forever. Greedy capitalists half a world away fell for a ponzi-scheme and dragged the rest of us down with them, and it's been shit ever since - made even worse for a time by a succession of useless SA presidents who made the Rand drop every time they said something stupid or that made foreign investors crap their pants.
The Rand today is hovering around R18 to the 1$, which is pretty fucking terrible, let me tell you.
In the last ten years or so, quite a lot has changed in my life. My mom died in 2013 and I went from living in a two-income household to being the full-time breadwinner in a single-income household. I got married in 2018, and while I'm much happier as a result, that did have an impact on my finances - groceries, medical aid and clothing etc. for two is more costly than for one. While I've had a full-time job at the same company for 33 years, and in that time received 2 or 3% annual increases, the annual cost of living increase has averaged around 4 or 5% or even more; and I've grown successively poorer with every passing year.
Not that the SA government doesn't know this, they simply don't give a damn. Why? Because those in power are inevitably wealthy people. Politics is big business you see, and wealth insulates people from seeing the misery they create for others. That said, it makes little difference to them if the Rand takes a downturn because the president said or did something blatantly stupid.
It was years ago now that I could afford to put away R500 a month, but when I did, something would come along that would suck it up like blotting paper to spilled ink: a broken fridge or a car repair, or some other unexpected emergency would come up as if right on cue. And then the cost of living rose to the point where I couldn't afford to even put that pathetic little R500 aside anymore. For example, my medical aid is going up a full R1000 in January, which not only eats into money I need for other things, but knocks my basic salary back to what it was two years ago.
It's not about making debt or having debts or being irresponsible - it's simply the cost of living. Necessities cost money. Even if you're a homeowner and don't have a homeloan to pay off, you HAVE to pay municipal property taxes, service fees for water, sewerage, electricity etc. Then you HAVE to have insurance on that property. In today's world you need to have a security service (or your home contents and car insurance costs more). Groceries represent the single largest expense on my monthly budget at R4000 (up from R3000 just a year ago).
Fuel is now so expensive I only drive to work and back and for groceries and necessities, and have to combine trips to save fuel - and it's a new car with impressively low fuel consumption. And don't even think about suggesting the car payment is a "luxury" - you have to have a car to get to work as there's no public transport where I work. It costs me just R1962 pm, and it's the cheapest new car I could afford, and I had to take the plan over 7 years to be able to afford it - even with having raised a deposit! That said, if you see me driving around in a shiny late model red car, bear in mind that I don't own it - the fucking bank does - and I'm basically just renting it.
Literally HALF my salary gets cut away by medical aid fees, retirement annuity, and insurance before it even arrives in my bank account - and I literally can't afford to cut any of it. Can you do without medical? What would happen if I or my wife were injured or got seriously ill and needed hospital care? With costs being what they are today, I couldn't afford to pay those accounts in cash even if I saved that money. Instead, we'd end up being another statistic, probably one of the poor people waiting for days in queues at public hospitals and clinics to see a doctor or a nurse, and even dying unattended. No, I'm not exaggerating - Google it.
Just about the only "non-essential" item left on my budget that I could cancel is internet - and if I cut that, I might as well go check myself into a mental hospital because it's the only avenue I have left to express my creativity and find entertainment.
Costs go up and up, and for a decade or more now, salary increases haven't kept pace with the inflation rate - and all but the insulated rich parasites at the top of the pyramid know what I'm talking about here. For all they care, I should just eat fewer avocado toasties and drink coffee at home. I buy the cheapest of everything, and spend rands while trying to save pennies. My montly treat of having a single small plate of sushi (Spar is the cheapest, for once) has now turned into a once-every-two-months treat.
I think I deserve better, don't you?
It's 2025 and after 33 years of working for the same employer, having a gleaming professional reputation and a salary that looks pretty good on paper, I still basically live hand-to-mouth. In fact, it's getting worse, not better. I live in fear that one day I won't be able to scrap by anymore and that I'll have to actually start cutting the essentials off my budget too - come what may. Who needs a retirement fund, right? Or medical? And face it, who really needs to eat?
If I didn't inherit the home I live in from my late mom, I wouldn't have been able to afford to buy (or even RENT) one today. I honestly don't know how other people who have home loans manage it. I'd probably be working and homeless, living in the back of a van. There's something awfully disquieting about all of that - and if it doesn't disturb you as much as it does me, you need to fucking wake up.
Speaking of which, we all have a measure of loose change lying about, don't we? My old Ma used to save all her copper coins, diligently sorting them in the correct denominations and amounts sorted into plastic bank baggies, and she'd go deposit them at the bank. Her retirement lump-sum went into the "money market" and somehow she managed to build up quite a nest-egg - and I'm sorry to say, that's not something I find myself able to repeat.
Not for lack of trying though - until fairly recently I used to do the same thing. Or tried to. Once a year I used to take all my coins to the bank - both to get rid of them, and also to put them to good use. That's no longer an option, because banks don't like to take coinage anymore. At least, mine doesn't - another reason why I call them "CRAPitec". Since they opened in the early 2010s they had a dedicated teller station that used to accept coins - they even had a machine that used to automatically count the coins and credit your account within a few minutes. All the teller had to do was empty the bags of coins into the feeder - and that was that - AND then, last year, they hit me with a R40 service fee just for doing that - which ate away HALF of the amount I'd deposited and left me holding a slip and wondering what's the fucking point?! I'd just like to point out that there was NO labor here. A machine did it. All the teller did was press a fucking power button. Was that worth R40?! Still, it was still better than nothing, right?
This year they deleted the coin deposit machine (and the teller and her counter along with it), so if you want to deposit cash of any kind into your Crapitec account, you need to use one of the specialist ATMs outside the branch (where there's no security guard), and even though I have no idea if the machine would accept masses of 10, 20 and 50 cent coins loose or in a bag at all, I DO have an idea that it would cost either the same or more than before. That pretty much ended my attempts to save coins - I'm not sure what other banks are like on that issue, but I don't see a point in opening an account with another bank just to deposit coins into, that will just be eaten away by "service fees" within a month or two anyway. What am I supposed to do with change now? Imagine rocking up at a Pick 'n Pay and trying to pay for something with a couple bankies full of coppers? I wonder if the SA Reserve Bank even realizes that "legal tender" doesn't really apply to its coins anymore?
But I digress.
It never used to be this way. Banks used to pay for their running costs using the money they made from holding their clients money - AND they made a profit from doing so. Greed is the only explanation for why they would switch to charging for every little fucking thing - just like a corrupt nickel-and-dime medical aid, where every cotton swab and tongue depressor, every millimeter of surgical tape needs to be charged and accounted for.
I wrote some time ago about my experiences with ABSA bank, but briefly in 2023 I managed to save up R1000 - which mainly came from sales of my books on Amazon - and I wanted to invest it into a 32-day notice account. I'm an author, just to drive that point home - an author with over 40 titles to my name on Amazon. Not that it means anything, it seems - or at least, materialistically.
To my horror, I discovered that the ONLY bank in the country that would accept anything smaller than R5000 nowadays is ABSA, whose minimum was R1000. While that seemed all good and well, for a whole year I left it there in order to receive a measly R16 in "interest" for that period. I planned on leaving it there indefinitely - "interest on interest", right? Then in November 2023, through another peculiar set of circumstances too lengthy to go into here, I had another R3000 handy that I wanted to add to it before life came along and found other uses for it on my behalf.
In it went, eagerly accepted by ABSA.
What did ABSA do next? Well, they charged me a R64 deposit fee to do it.
That's right, they charged me more than I'd made in interest for the entire preceding year to deposit more money into the investment - swallowing up the entirety of the R16 "interest" I'd gained for an entire year - and a whole lot more!
Why should I be upset about that? If you can't work it out, maybe you haven't been paying attention.
They TOOK away more than they gave me for letting them use my money - because I added more money to the original amount.
It's the whole principle of the fucking thing isn't it? You'd think they'd be glad I was investing another R3000 into my account - and that having more money to work with (to make more money in turn) would be enough for them. Nope. ABSA delights in wringing their clients out to get every penny they can out of them. I'm actually surprised the kakkest bank in Africa doesn't charge people admission fees at their fucking door, or for the air-conditioned air they breathe while inside their branches.
Even in the case of Crapitec, they've gotten greedier of late. For a number of years now, I've had an account with KDP (Amazon) and they send proceeds of my book sales to my bank account, usually in modest amounts that follow pretty much the same monthly pattern. Imagine my shock in November when I started getting urgent messages from Crapitec asking me to visit a branch without saying why. When I got there, I was told it was about me receiving forex. Yes, it's my writing royalties, I told them. I usually receive a small amount each month - in Dollars, this is probably the ONLY time the shitty exchange rate works in my favor - or at least, used to. The issue? Well, as it turned out, the amount being sent to me (when converted to Rands from USD) turned out to be less than R50 - which they informed me was the fee for processing forex deposits.
The what? How much? Since when?
Now I'm not clear on when Crapitec started charging for this service, or how much it may have been in the past - but let me just add that in the past year alone there have been a number of similar amounts that worked out to less than R50 - and they made the journey across the Atlantic safely - so this has got to be a new thing on Crapitec's part. The end result is that I lost the R38 because I decided that paying R50 to receive R38 made no sense at all to me.
What would happen to the money, I asked. I was told it would be sent back to KDP - and it would incur fees from middlemen along the way, meaning that essentially there would be nothing left. So my hard work and measly reward for that hard work would get used up by red-tape, eaten up by the fucking capitalist machine.
You might notice I've been criticizing capitalism and capitalists a bit more lately, and I have to wonder why you're not doing the same? I mean, you may THINK you're a capitalist, but let me deliver you a wake-up call: if you're not a CEO or a billionaire, you're not a capitalist, you're just a replaceable cog in a machine built to feed them.
"Why don't you contact KDP and ask them to change their arrangements?" The consultant at the bank asked. I laughed. Have you ever tried to contact KDP before? A real, live human being and not a bot? Bots that argue in circles? Anyone that makes a lick of sense? It's like ramming your head into a wood-chipper, except that might hurt less.
KDP doesn't allow alternative methods of payment (like Paypal, presumably because of all the bad blood between Bezos and Musk, and well, billionaires make their own rules) and nor will they allow holding the payouts over until they reach higher amounts to cover transfer fees. As far as they're concerned, they've paid me - it's not their problem if my shitty bank eats up all the money - or the middlemen they both use, do.
So, to sum up - suddenly, out of nowhere, Crapitec bank has a R50 "service fee" for handling money from abroad that it apparently never had before. It also means that every time in the foreseeable future that KDP sends me R50 or less, it means that money will be lost to me. It also means that, should I be paid more than R50, R50 of that amount will be lost to me - so, if I got R60 from KDP, I'd just get out a pathetic R10 - the rest would be docked in "service fees" (that catch-all excuse for what is essentially hijacking and highway robbery) to the fucking bank.
Could someone please explain to me how this isn't an entirely manufactured, deliberately created scenario intended to fuck people over even more?
It is December 2024, and in the last 2 months I have now lost $7 (R151) to this insanity. Okay, sure, that's not much you might say, in fact it's downright pathetic really - but as an indie author watching the growth of my writing career and market, every cent counts. Book money goes aside and I let it build up - and this is robbing me of the progress I've been working for all these years. For the last few years, I've been fighting tooth and nail to try and increase my sales and earnings year by year. However, even without the loss incurred by this outrageous mess-up, I've already earned less from my writing this year than I did last year.
In fact, it is nothing less than robbery! These people may clothe themselves with the respectability and veneer provided by other people's money, but they're nothing less than rotten, disgusting thieves, leeches and parasites without an ounce of decency, honesty or humanity.
There are plenty of pre-existing reasons why being an indie author is what it is - being an indie writer is challenging enough having to compete with other authors on Amazon, but it was manageable until recently. Having to also compete with the flood of fake AI trash inundating Amazon - with Amazon's complicit approval - has had a measurable impact on sales of real books by real human authors all-round. Now, thanks to corporate greed and machinations by banks and those ubiquitous "middlemen", it seems I can't even get paid for the few sales I do make.
It's not as if Amazon doesn't already take the majority percentage of each sale before I even get my "cut", right? Except now I don't even get that either.
After years of mediocre, moderately improving success and modest sales, it is now actually costing me more money to publish, market and sell my own books than I make off them. Earlier this month, I even had to cancel my author website hosting - you'll notice it's gone offline as of Xmas day (that's all I got for Xmas btw) because it's been costing me R299 a month - which is more than my monthly earnings from writing, and I simply can't afford it any longer. That's not even taking the almost R400 I had to pay annually just for the domain name. It's fucking heartbreaking. Years of hard work and getting that website just right, building an audience, all gone - and for fucking what? It's things like this that make me just feel like just giving up. What's the fucking point?
What's the point in working hard for years and years to try and build something that will give you a decent second income, that conceivably could've become your main income eventually, when "service providers" and banks - capitalists - all contrive to sabotage your every move and make it pointless and unprofitable?
Make no mistake: the entire banking system has been engineered towards keeping poor people poor. And there's no doubt at all: it's working.
You know that old saying "it takes money to make money"? Well that goes for banking too. If you can't afford to invest R5000 or R10,000 in some cases (looks askance at Nedbank), or have lump-sums lying around to invest into abstract things like "the money market" - all you have left is a so-called "savings account" - at a bank that nickel-and-dimes you to death.
Do you begin to see why I'm upset? Please, tell me why I shouldn't be?
Nothing would cheer me up more than to watch the whole fucking filthy mess burn to the ground, and then to piss on it afterwards.
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