PaydayLoan.com.au

PAYDAY just wasn't the same when the cash went. The satisfaction of pulling a bundle of folded notes from the yellow envelope was swapped in just one week almost 20 years ago for a near illegible banking slip, but it was all for the good we were assured.

Security, employers said, and no risk of violent robbery, more convenient for employees, no counting errors, the money would be in our accounts a day earlier.

It just wasn't the same in all sorts of ways. Payday drinks and the cunning kick stocked with a note or two before the pay was handed over to the family's financial controller petered out, but our real loss was much greater.

That loss was the last opportunity to be relatively independent of the recently deregulated banks. Sure, most of us had a loan and a savings account, but we also had cash that had nothing to do with a bank we didn't get it from a bank and we weren't going to put it in a bank.

A bank account became compulsory, and very quickly the notion that the banks paid us interest for the use of our money was dropped. Indeed, not only did the banks charge fees for using our accounts, they charged fees when we didn't use our accounts. Sometimes the bank fees consumed all the money in the account then continued to mount as a debt!

And governments took a share every time our money went into and left our account.

But still we didn't seem to realise just how beholden we'd become.

The credit card was a wonderful innovation, a loan permanently on tap. What's more, the banks gave us an interest-free month to pay. Later the banks said they had to increase credit-card fees to cover the cost of servicing those people who avoided interest by paying within a month.

The banks gave credit cards to virtually any adult who'd accept one, and while they made higher profits because of that they told us we'd have to pay high interest rates to cover the higher level of bad debt.

The credit card became close to essential try renting a car, booking a room in a four-star hotel, paying an M7 toll or buying something on the net without one.

Still, many of us have been stung and use our credit card sparingly.

It's not the credit card that has nailed us to the banks' cross. It's the Eftpos card.

The use of these cards took a while to catch on. For a long time we'd queue at the tellers' windows to withdraw our money, so the banks discouraged this by reducing the number of tellers and thus lengthening the queues, then by closing hundreds of branches, and finally by charging us to have a teller hand over our money.

St George Bank, for example, charges $2.50, the Commonwealth Bank $2.

To use our Eftpos card at the bank's own automatic teller machine St George charges 60 cents, the Commonwealth 50 cents.

And so not only has our income been forced into a bank, and not only have we been forced to pay to withdraw it, we've been effectively forced to use an Eftpos card to withdraw it. And so we have come to accept the use of an Eftpos card; indeed we've come to rely on it.

We use the card instead of cash. I use it to pay for anything that costs more than $20 and so does my wife. I discovered to my surprise as I prepared to write this column that I pay 75 cents every time I use it to pay for something I'd been under the false impression that the merchant paid a fee. (The retailer pays a fee to accept payment by credit card, not Eftpos.)

We've embraced also the convenience of a proliferation of ATMs, many of us withdrawing money from the nearest ATM, which is never far away. Half our ATM withdrawals are from an ATM not owned by our bank.

We pay $1.50 to use another bank's ATM, and I didn't know that until recent publicity about Westpac increasing its charge to $2. The other banks won't be far behind.

Independently owned ATMs, and there are quite a few, charge more but finding how much is not easy.

Strange that ATMs are not required, like other goods and services, to display the fee.

Do you get the impression that the deregulated banks are bringing us slowly to the boil?

jcorbett@theherald.com.au