Spreadsheet with interest

[JulesRamone]

Hi Vampiress,

Can you help please?

I'm just putting in an N1 tomorrow morning--5th June. But I can't quite get my head round all this interest stuff. To quote BF's crib for the N1 form:

 

Charges £xxx.xx

Overdraft Interest £xxx.xx

Interest under s.69 County Courts Act 1984 £xxx.xx

Court Fee £xx.xx

 

TOTAL £ xx.xx

 

Plus interest pursuant to S.69 County Courts Act 1984 from date of issue to date of judgement/settlement at £xx.xx per day [(enter daily rate here - (CHARGES+OD interest)x 0.00022 = pence per day)] OR at such rate and for such periods as the court deems just.

 

There seems to be three kinds of interest here. I've done the excel spreadsheet which I think calculates the s.69 interest on a daily rate of 8%. But what are the other two kinds of interest? Maybe if I'm not clever enough I should leave them out. But I'm not sure if I can claim the s.69 without claiming the other types.

Can You help???

MANY thanks.

JulesR

[JulesRamone]

Thanks Fred,

I'm beginning to understand now. I think I now understand that the s.69 interest has two parts, firstly the spreadsheet calculation, ie each 'offence/breach' the date, the days since the charge was taken and the accumulated interest at 8% all added together. The spreadsheet does that very easily, no problem. The second part I also NOW understand, which is the s.69 still accruing AFTER the N1 claim has been made, and this s.69 acts not on each 'offence' but on the entire lump sum claimed on the day the N1 was submitted, and accruing each day AFTER the N1 and up UNTIL the day the judgement is made. All this s.69 is money THEY have taken from the CLAIMANT in interest on top of levying the charge itself.

 

The other kind, the second kind of interest, is basically the amount the CLAIMANT charges the BANK for borrowing the CLAIMANT's money... and that's where it gets a bit too complicated for me. I read one thread here where the claimant was considering charging this overdraft interest at the bank's own 'unauthorised overdraft interest rate', which could be as much as 29%. The confusion for me is that this is more difficult to work out, and it seems the interest rate is particular to each case and each bank. I can see how it is difficult to give guidance on this area.

 

I hope I've understood the basics. Very many thanks for getting back. I'm submitting the N1 this morning.

JulesR

[JulesRamone]

Hi,

 

I hope someone can help me do i input the details of my charges and the interest charged or just the interest charged.

 

I'm confused.

 

tasha

 

Hi tasha,

you dont say where you are in the process... the best thing to do is start by reading the FAQS in the bank charges forum... and you can also find there templates of everything else you need as well. It's also a good idea to start a thread with the details of your claim in the forum for your particular bank. But here is a quick guide, stage by stage, which might help:

 

If youre at stage one, the thing to do is get all details of your charges from the bank. You can get up to six years' worth of charges back, and of course few people keep their statements for that long but you can get them to send you the statements under the data protection act.

 

Once you've got all the charges listed in front of you, with the dates they were TAKEN from the account, ie not the date you were notified of the charges, THEN put all the charges with dates onto the excel spreadsheet provided by vampiress at the top of this thread. You will notice FIRSTLY that when you list the charges with the dates in the right columns, there is a totaliser function at the bottom of the charges list which adds up the amount of charges in the list. SECONDLY, when you put a charge its column and then the date in the date column next to it, AUTOMATICALLY a function will give you two pieces of information in the next two columns, a) the number of days since the money was taken from your account, called 'the offence' b) the amount of s.69 INTEREST that you are due from them given the amount of the charge and the number of days. THIRDLY there are two more totalisers at the bottom of the s.69 list, one which is the total of the bits of interest you are claiming for each charge, ie adding up all the items in the s.69 list above, and the second totaliser adds the TOTAL OF CHARGES to the TOTAL OF INTEREST, and gives you the grand total in a box on the right hand side of the page under the s.69 total.

 

When you've filled in that, what you do is make two copies to your own PC or mac, one which has just the charges on it, and the second which has the interest on it, with the two further totals. Keep the second one for later, because you are only going to need the first one for the moment. There are two more stages before you make a formal claim which will include the interest you want back. For the moment, once you've filled in the spreadsheet, write to the bank telling them you want £x amount of money back which is the total amount of charges ONLY that you've got on your first spreadsheet, ie the one saved without the interest on it.

 

When you send them this first letter with the charges list, it's called a PRELIMINARY REQUEST and there is a template on this site, in the Bank templates thread. Follow the instructions regarding this PRELIM letter, it says in the letter how much time you give them to reply.

 

The bank may reply, they may not, for, unless they give your money back straight away, you then send the next letter which is called the LETTER BEFORE ACTION. With this letter, again you send the same spreadsheet which has ONLY the charges on it, and not the s.69 interest. Again, they have fourteen days to reply. The point of that letter is to tell them you are about to make a claim through the small claims system if they dont hand over the money.

 

And that's the next step, after their two weeks reply period is up. You NOW take the spreadsheet on which you have saved the interest column with the two extra totals (the one adding the interest items up, and the second adding the interest total to the charges total to give the grand total). You go to the N1 claim form, fill it in exactly as the guide notes on this site explain, and print out the spreadsheet with interest and either take them or send them to your local county court. At every stage you have to send the letters by recorded delivery as proof of postage. The idea is that when you make a small claim the bank might DEFEND, ie say that they dont owe you the money. The whole thing might end up in court, at which point you have to have proof of all the letters youve sent.

 

That's pretty much it--the whole thing. The first step is definitely to find out how much charges theyve taken from you over the last six years (do it with every account you have) then fill in the spreadsheet and make the two copies. After that you just follow all the letter templates provided in the bank letter templates thread.

 

Good luck. It's easier than it appears, and it will take several weeks, probably a couple of months.

 

Cheers,

JulesR

[JulesRamone]

Sorry I think I am having a blonde moment (or the fact I'm doing this with 3 children to keep eye on too). I've filled in the complex spreadsheet. Not being that good at excel I'm trying to work out how it works exactly. Shouldn't there be a place to put my overdraft limit in or does that not matter?

Sometimes the interest on penalties matches the amount in the interest charged cell, but sometimes not.

I'm sure I have done something wrong!

 

Hi trudd,

I'm not sure if I can help entirely, but here are some thoughts...

I dont think the overdraft limit matters at any stage. they have charged you for being over your overdraft limit or not having enough funds for direct debits or bounced cheques, but the reason for each charge is secondary to the fact that they took the money from you. Just put each charge in the charge column, and the date it was taken from your account. Then the two next columns have functions which should work out how many days since that date and how much s.69 interest has accrued on that particular charge. When I did the excel spreadsheet I found that it couldn't handle any kind of cutting and pasting, except in the 'unpaid cheque/unauth o/d' column on the far left. What I tried to do is cut and paste the date for instance or the charge amount to make it faster, as you would on a word document. It did the cutting and pasting BUT the functions for 'date since the offence' and 's.69 interest' then for some reason didn't work on the cutted and pasted entries i'd done. i had to redo it from scratch once... i'm not very good at excel either!

 

Looking at your query again, im not sure if I fully understand what you mean by: 'interest on penalties matches the amount in the interest charged cell'. As far as I know there is only one interest column, the furthest right-hand one of the five. I found that if you put in the charge and the date, the days since the charge was removed from your account and the interest accrued are automatic...

 

Anyway, as I say, Im not that good at excel. I hope this has helped a bit.

JulesR

[JulesRamone]

What I mean is sometimes the value in a cell in Q does match the value put in H (on the same line) and sometimes doesn't. Is it meant to match or not?

 

 

This is over my head really... sorry. I think I just used a simple spreadsheet, definitely excel, which just had reasonforcharge/charge/date/dayssince/s.69accrued columns. I think you are aiming to charge them interest on the money theyve 'borrowed' from you, which i definitely didn't do. This doesn't look like the spreadsheet i used... I will have a look at this and try to work it out, but that'll take till tomorrow. Maybe someone else can help...

JulesR