Bernard Boshoff writes: I have been embarking on a quest to get myself out of the banks’ pocket; and truth be told this quest is about 2 years old, but is slowly but surely becoming a reality. I have managed to kill debt by renting as opposed to paying interest on a bond for my entire life and having the bank repo my house when I become too old to pay my bond instalments… Also I have paid off two cars by allocating a large sum of my disposable income to settling the debt sooner. However this has not paid off as well as I had hoped. The bank ended up taking their 12.5%+ interest, seemingly irrespective of my desire to pay them off sooner. I recently settled a R30 000 loan, which after 1 year instalments would be closer to the tune of R37 500. In 5 months I managed to clear the loan at a cost of R35 100. Falling less than ONE INSTALMENT short of the full term loan interest.

I mean surely the bank pro rates this to the time taken to pay off the loan. But in my case they seemed more concerned with getting as close as possible to their previous agreed number of R37 500. I basically, by “my calculations” settled in less than half the time and I got taken for 68% of the interest… Surely if this were more fair it would have been the other way around, but this is the problem with the banking cartel. Nothing is fair when it comes to the little guy… the simple customer… the man on the street…

Case in point. I trade currencies on the FOREX market and was recently shocked when we exchanged some slightly less valued South African Rands at ‘spot’ rate of R7.85 for Dollars to facilitate a product purchase earlier this week. I was in complete disarray when a certain “Simpler” Blue Banking Cartel proceeded to extricate an extra 70 cents or 70000 pips on the transaction.

Now to place you in perspective… 70-100 pips in about the average session range for a move in the Euro US Dollar (EURUSD)… The average session range in the ZARUSD is around 10 000pips+ or 10-20 cents on a bad day… What had clearly happened was little old customer got the short end of the volatility stick in the buy sell spreads and ended up paying 70 cents more than the quoted “spot” price. Had the Rand appreciated that day, well I’m sure they would have stuck with my initial quote of R7.85… To make it worse, the market never even reached R8.55 to the Dollar all week!!!

I’ve been reading stories lately of American Banks (namely Bank of New York) getting into trouble over betting against clients in a similar fashion, and giving them the lesser price and pocketing the profits (SPREAD) for themselves… Which when you gear or leverage that spread at 100 to 1 means they made A HUGE PROFIT off my 70 cents!

So in short I want to say that banks are all a cartel of thieves and rouges… What is happening in Wall Street and across the world with the #occupywallstreet movement is no coincidence. People are sick and tired of getting the short end of the stick and being exploited by these banksters. Rather pay them off as soon as possible, save rather than loan and invest in entrepreneurial businesses which have potential to succeed, that way those businesses don’t have to apply for loans from the banksters, and you as an investor become an owner of a company. How nice to actually own something rather than being indebted to an entity which is likened to a parasite that is feeding off its host, its customers… Look at what is happening in Greece. Those poor people are suffering because if the Greek people were to default the banks would take a massive loss off their balance sheet. Oh No! we can’t have the banks losing money! Heavens no! let the people absorb the risk, let the people take the knock.

Rant Over

The best cure is prevention: I never got into debt in the first place.