Latest bullet dodged, so I can share it with you now.
Last month, when working out the best day for me to go bankrupt I hit upon a problem. The payroll department in my company requires over two weeks notice of a new bank account to put my pay into, and so I couldn't get this to square with other factors like when my direct debits come out of my account. Basically, I couldn't sort out a date to go bankrupt and still have time to get a new bank account and get my pay paid into it. Problem. So my wife and I came up with my pay going into her bank account for a month, with that giving me enough time to set something more permanent up. This sounded like a good idea at the time and I contacted my works payroll department with her bank details.
All looked fine, but we soon hit problems. My wife will go bankrupt soon too, so she hasn't been paying her Barclaycard. The trouble was that her bank account is with Barclays, and we were shocked to find that after a couple of months of missed payments to Barclaycard they effectively dug into my wife's Barclays account to pay part of her Barclaycard debt. They also sent a nice letter (after they had taken the money) ... 'We are writing to advise you that we have carried out our legal right to set off part of the outstanding arrears owing on your Barclaycard account against the credit balance in your Barclays account...'. I bet not many of you knew they could do that! So suddenly we had visions that as soon as my pay went into the account that they would happily help themselves to it to pay a chunk of the Barclaycard debt.
My pay went in at midnight last night, so this morning my wife sat down at the computer to transfer the money into my new Co-operative account - and guess what? 'Transfer delayed 24 hours to help protect against fraud' .... Oh my God, we can't get the money out. Mass panic for a few seconds before a new plan came to us - my wife was to go to the bank first thing and withdraw it personally, and pray that the bank teller didn't try to be clever.
My wife called me at work at around 9:45, 'I've got the money.'
Big sigh of relief from me.
