Jane and Russ Middleton

Hi Guys
I am sure this question has been asked plenty of times before, so please bare with me

I need to open a Ozzie bank account, but i am not sure what bank to go with, i have studied ANZ, Commonwealth and HSBC websites, they all seem to have these little charges for this and that.

What i would like to know is which bank has the most branches, atm machines, really the most accesible bank, and of course the cheapest available to me. I will be living on the sunshine or gold coast.

Cheers
Russ

thribble

They all have charges, and it varies with the account. I don't know about ATM numbers up north, but ANZ/Commonwealth are common down here in Melbourne, with HSBC a significant way behind. I think I've seen one. But I believe you can get at your money through the GPO (correct me if I'm wrong someone?) -you certainly can for the commonwealth, which is handy in country.

However, and this is the biggie, I have found Commonwealth to suck, generally. Their branches shut at 4pm (or just before) when others stay open until 5pm. They have an internet banking site, which is reasonable, but you have to sign up and get your stuff posted to you (I don't know how this compares with others). They have consistently posted our stuff to our UK address, despite me changing our postal address to our oz one twice. They then managed to change my postal address, but not my husband's (on a joint bank account!). I guess the final thing is, for me, that they apply these charges, but they don't show up on my netbank statement, so I have no idea of knowing how much, short of counting my monthly transactions (like, yes, that's going to happen!).

So in short, unless someone says something bad about ANZ, I'd go with them! I think it's them that's just released a visa debit card? Could be Westpac though. You can't use the CommBank card - eftpos - over the phone or net, and have ridiculous daily limits on it.

Fardell

I agree entirely with the comments regarding the Commonwealth - their own CEO even recently admitted they had a "customer relationship problem". If you do a search on the forum I think you will find that's the general view. I bank with Westpac and I am reasonably happy so they are an alternative to ANZ. The site www.infochoice.com.au does a good job of comparing the fees and benefits of a large range of potential bank accounts - you might find its a good starting point too!

Jonahs_mummy

We have got an acct with Westpac & have joined OzForex to transfer the cash over.


Claire
x

CadburysFingers

I posted a thread recently to try and collate some info before we changed banks from the very expensive Commonwealth Bank. The result of all the info received was I opened two accounts with the National Bank (www.national.com.au) Seems an excellent bank from the staff I have encountered thus far.

We opened a Smart Saver account $3 per month, with unlimited EFTPOS and ATM transactions, which suits us perfectly.

We also linked it to an I Saver account (5.45% interest calculated daily) The good thing about this account is it has no minimum balance required to get your 5.45% so we simply keep all our dosh in there, then transfer it via the net to the other account if we know we need some money for anything.

$3 a month for everything we need from a bank, at the Commonwealth we were paying around $20 a month and had to keep a balance of over $5000 to earn the higher rate of interest in our second account. It was an easy choice to make. I presume this can all be done online from the UK.

gina

Weve done the same as clair and both seem to be really good-very helpful!

hope this helps geex