Questionable Content 10: La Li Lu Le Lo

[halfeye]

Man my rent is paid by direct debit. I've never even met my landlord. America needs to catch up with Europe already.

Standing orders are old tech. probably from the 1800s or maybe even earlier, they are paid regularly the same amount every time, you can change the payee or amount but the payor has to do it. Direct Debits the amount can be varied by the payee without the payor knowing until they get a statement.

Checks are simple, and if it's a weekend rent payment where payday falls on the weekend as well, I can more easily make sure rent is paid on time but is not withdrawn from my account before my paycheck is processed. That can happen.

What happened to me was the landlord didn't cash the cheques for several months, and I wasn't watching that closely, so the first I knew was I was overdrawn. That was an unpleasant surprise. I prefer standing orders, you know where you are with those.

That's not how that works though.

Fixed that for you, I don't agree though.

I mean it can set it up like that, so the landlord gives the order to deduct the money from another account, but then it needs a written consent form, that he has to present to the bank and only allows very specific transaction, and you as the tenant can recall the money for 6 weeks after the transaction if anything fishy goes on. So it's actually very save, the landlord can't just empty your bank account (and if he does, without permission, you can sue him for theft I guess).

I've had a Direct Debit made against my account for several hundred pounds that I knew nothing about. It was apparently a mistake, but I'm still not convinced that it wasn't deliberate.

So actually most landlords will prefer it going the other way. The tenant will give his bank the order to send X money on the 1st of the month to the landlords account. The end.
That way the tenant knows the landlord can't do anything on his own, and for the landlord there's the safety that the money won't be pulled back after a while. It's also less work for them.

That's standing orders, which are good, Direct Debits are not the same at all.

But I saw that before, that Americans seem to have a fear of giving anyone their bank account because then they could steal all the money.
Either the american bank system is so crappy that that actually works, or most people just don't understand how it works. In fact, you can more easily empty someone's account by having their credit card number, and those they apparently throw around willy-nilly.

That's all banks. If crooks get your bank details, all your money can be withdrawn. You'll probably get it back, the bank will be very nice about it once they believe you're not trying to scam them, but it will be a very inconvenient few days, especially if you have no other resources until you get your money back.

Btw, we (in Germany) also get our pay send to our account that way automatically. No paycheck or anything we have to manually carry to the bank. Just usually the last day of the months or the first day it arrives on the account.

That's BACS, it's international, maybe Russia and China as well as the EU and USA, but the whole world is pretty much connected now. It's not all good, though on the whole it's mostly better than not.