Rhonda Bracey: At Random

Some photos I took recently above the basalt rock area at Bunbury’s Back Beach. It was wild and woolly, with a cold biting wind — but invigorating!

I’m convinced that Westpac has it in for us… or they are just bloody incompetent. Thanks goodness for our contact at Westpac otherwise I would’ve have torn my hair out in sheer frustration trying to get this mess sorted.

See these blog posts for how they’ve stuffed up previous house/land purchases/sales:

• 2007: https://rhondabracey.com/2007/02/16/bank-stuff-up/
• 2010: https://rhondabracey.com/2010/04/22/bank-loses-64k-of-our-money/

And they’ve done it again.

We recently sold an investment property we’ve had for 18 years. It settled (closed) yesterday (Thursday). In the documentation I’d given to the bank and the settlement agent, the instructions were clear:

1. Pay out and close a small loan with a line of credit facility (balance owing was less than $5000); let’s call this Account A (#285 below)
2. Put the remainder into our savings account; let’s call this Account B (#286 below).
3. Decrease the line of credit limits against two other loans; I’ll call them Accounts C (#969) and D (#332).

Simple, right? Not so much…

I logged into the Westpac online banking system this morning and this is what I saw:

Instead of paying out the Account A loan and putting the remainder into Account B, they paid out Account A and put the balance as a credit in Account A! Account A is a loan/mortgage account, not a savings account, and as the bank has our money for three business days before releasing it, I won’t be able to access it until probably next Tuesday. Even then, I don’t know how hard it will be to get the money out of that account in full as it’s not a savings account.

Meantime, the lines of credit on ALL the loans are zero balance. WTF? That means I can’t access any of those funds. Normally I wouldn’t want to, but as we’ve sold that house and as capital gains tax will be incurred on the sale this financial year and as the financial year ends on June 30, and as our accountant and financial adviser both advised putting the maximum allowable ($25,000) into my husband’s Superannuation account THIS financial year to minimise his capital gains tax, and as I have very few business days in which I can do that, AND as I have to travel 50 km to the bank to make this transfer because I can’t do it electronically owing to the bank’s electronic withdrawal limits, and as I can only do this on a Friday or Monday, and as next Friday is too late to meet the end of this financial year, I’m caught between a rock and a hard place. I didn’t transfer that money from one of the line of credit loans prior to settlement, just in case anything went wrong and the sale fell through. And now that settlement has occurred later than planned, and the bank has frozen the lines of credit for at least three business days while they adjust the limit, I can’t access the $25K and get it into his Super on time.

I emailed and called my banking contact person first thing this morning to find out what was going on and why I couldn’t access the lines of credit (I knew I couldn’t access the sale funds for three business days). She was brilliant as usual, and has been on the phone to the head office several times today to get an escalation happening.

The bottom line is that the bank freezes the lines of credit on the loans for THREE business days while they adjust the limit downwards. WTF? THREE business days???? To change a figure electronically? Come on!

So my bank contact — who doesn’t trust that it will all happen in time either (and she works for them!) — is currently arranging a temporary overdraft on our savings account so that I can transfer $25K into my husband’s Super account on Monday, and then pay it back once the sale funds become available. She said she will make sure the bank refunds any overdraft charges we incur as a result, so we shouldn’t be out of pocket.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time and worry on this, and she’s spent at least as much. All because someone somewhere didn’t read the instructions, and, if they weren’t sure about those instructions, didn’t make a phone call to me to check where I wanted the funds to go. My name and phone number is on ALL this documentation, so picking up the phone and making a call would’ve saved us all several hours of chasing up the bank — time that my bank lady and I would rather have spent today doing something else that was far more productive.

Sheer bloody incompetence, in my opinion. And it’s not an isolated instance either.

Update Monday 24 June 2013: Still no funds through, not even the ‘expedited’ overdraft facility. So I emailed my bank contact at 8:15 am, not expecting an answer from her until the bank opened at 9:30. However, she was on the phone to me within two minutes, and had just then transferred $25K into our savings account and will deal with any consequences with her bosses later. THANK YOU Tracy!

Update later Monday 24 June 2013: I went into town to a Westpac branch, where I handed over all the details to transfer the money into my husband’s Super fund account at BankWest. I knew there would be a charge ($25?), and the teller said it would take up to 48 hours. 48 hours to do an electronic bank to bank transfer??? WTF? What games do these guys play with our money in the interim??

Anyhoo… she tried to enter his code but their system only accepts up to seven numbers, not the 12 digit alphanumeric code for my husband’s account. WTF? So she suggested a brilliant strategy. How about she gave me the $25K in cash, and I walked next door to the BankWest branch and deposited it directly? No fee, no 48-hour transfer delay. Sounded like a good plan to me 😉 So she gave me five bundles of 100x $50 notes (no, I’ve never handled so much cash in my life before either) in a calico bag, and I walked out of the branch and literally next door to BankWest, where they happily accepted my money and were able to key in the alphanumeric code without a problem.

A week or so ago we had a lunar perigee, where the moon is the closest to Earth. Around that time as I was driving into town I noticed that the tide was exceptionally high in the estuary… almost to the road. Here are some photos taken from the car (yes, I pulled over but I didn’t get out):

Update 24 June 2013: Last night was the ‘supermoon’, and today when I came back from town around noon, the high tide was lapping the road in parts and had made inroads into some of the car parks and tracks into the estuary. Again, all pictures were taken from the car, when I was stopped.

Note in the last photo that the tide isn’t just on the estuary side — it also raises the water level in the low-lying parts of the other side of the road.

I spent yesterday at the Perth Craft Fair and QuiltWest exhibition. My feet were sore by the end of the day, but it was so inspirational that many of the issues just getting to the Perth Convention Centre disappeared fairly rapidly.

The main issue was that, without any notice, the organisers of the ‘HBF Run for a reason’ event closed The Esplanade from Spring St AND closed the Convention Centre car park until 11 am. All info I had prior to that event was that The Esplanade would be closed from Mill St. Even the trade exhibitors were caught with the closure of the car park at 7:30 am. And it seems the trains didn’t stop at the Convention Centre for some hours either (again, without notice as far as I could tell) — they went on to Central so anyone catching the train had to walk from the city station back to the Convention Centre. Not good for anyone with mobility issues who had deliberately caught the train to be dropped right at the Convention Centre.

Parking was at a premium as the city centre was host to 30,000 runners, but I eventually parked the car up behind Parliament House! My friend Joan and I had a long downhill walk to the Convention Centre…

Back to the Fair… The big plus of those road, train, and car park closures was that the Convention Centre was almost empty of everyone except officials and stallholders for the first couple of hours, which meant we could get around without bumping into other people or being forced to move on because of the pressure of crowds. And we could get to speak to stallholders and view their products without hindrance. And get a seat at some of the free demos.

The highlight of the event was the QuiltWest exhibition, which highlighted some of the stunning work by local quilters, and had on display the Australian winners of a national competition, and some from a South Australian competition. And there was a big display of community quilts— many of which I recognised as I’d quilted them 😉

I took a heap of photos on my camera phone, so the quality of the images is not particularly good. I tried to capture the essence of the works, but of course, the exquisite detail is lost. I didn’t record any information about each quilt, so here are the photos, not in any particular order.

We had a few stormy days last week, with quite a lot of rain. In between breaks in the downpours, I took this photo of the next band of rain about to hit. Ominous, but not as ominous as the bands that had gone before it!

I have a few protea bushes in the garden, of at least three different varieties (one I know is a Pincushion protea). One of the bushes (tree?) is in flower at the moment. I know it’s not a King Protea, but it’s similar and has a large flower. Anyone know what variety it is? At a guess, the flower head is about 10 to 15 cm (4 to 6 inches) across.

There are always black swans on the estuary close to us, but a couple of times a year there are hundreds, if not thousands, of them. These mass congregations seem to be about September and April, and are possibly related to nesting/mating and hatching seasons, though I haven’t confirmed this. Mostly, the congregations are well out in the middle of estuary, but this year I’ve seen quite a few swans reasonably close to shore when I’ve driven into town (the road hugs the estuary for much of the way).

And for the first time, I’ve even seen one (twice) on the other side of the road, near a natural (?) pond with bulrushes right next to a house. I suspect this bird is nesting there, though waddling across the road would be fraught with danger.

Here are some photos I took with my phone the other day on my drive back home from the shops. None of the birds was really close to shore, but it was such a nice day and the estuary was looking so good, I wanted to take some photos! The black dots in the background are some of the swans — this is where they normally hang out. The estuary is about 20 km long, and there are swans along the whole length of it, so these pictures are only a tiny snapshot of some of the swans.

I was going through some old files the other day, weeding out stuff that was no longer relevant, when I came across this letter from my bank regarding my mortgage. It’s dated 1989 and took me straight back to the time when struggling to pay the mortgage was a grim reality.

I’d sold my first house and had really extended myself for my second place. When I took out the mortgage on the second property in April 1988, interest rates were around 13.5% and I budgeted my payments for 15%. The creeping rates became a real concern when they went past 15% and just didn’t stop.

The only good thing about those rising interest rates was that they forced me into taking in a rent-paying roommate. I was more than content to live by myself, but my killer mortgage forced me into sharing my house with a total stranger who happened to be a good friend (and later wife) of an old friend of mine. Well, that stranger — a young girl from Minnesota — became a really good friend, someone whom I still keep in touch with today.

So good things can come out of dark days.

The things you find on the internet…

This article (http://www.harveyoralhistory.com/site/history.php?ID=64) is about the doctor who delivered me and my sister and the hospital he delivered us in. I was a feet-first breech, which was a pretty dangerous thing for a small country practice doctor to deal with at the time, and went blue within hours — his matron was passing the nursery (mothers were separated from their babies then) and saw me and resuscitated me, otherwise I wouldn’t be here today.

I even remember him making up pills etc. and putting them in little round cardboard pill boxes!

He was our family doctor until I was 13 and we moved to another town.