I don't know about your banks over there, but I opened my own bank acount independently when I was 13. All you do is put your money in, if you leave it there they give you interest. you can take it out as and when.

The only charges you get are if you go in debt, which I've done once and they charged me 25 pence.

What happens in your banks over there? Why can't you open one if you're not working?

Sweet jesus you guys are lucked.

1. We don't get interest on our accounts unless they're Savings accounts (usually), which means no checks or check-cards (usually).

2. I have a savings account with a few grand in it and I get a whopping .5% interest. No, not 5%, 0.5%. Woo. With a couple thou, that comes out to like a dollar every quarter. OMFG!

3. I also have money in a CD (checking deposit). I get a MAD 1.5% interest on it! And I can't touch the money for 6 months. Plus the minimum CD size is a good chunk of cash.

4. If we overdraft here, the average fee is somewhere between $25-$50 per over draft, plus if it's a credit card or something they'll bounce up your interest rate. It can also go on your credit report, which will screw you for credit cards and loans and crap.

I foresee that England will become the new debt capital of the world soon.

Well, the interest on standard current accounts here in the UK is negligible. You get like £1 per quarter year or something like that.

That abysmal for a savings account. I've got one that gives 5% and you can still withdraw from it as you wish. Any more that 5% and you need to start looking into bonds.

lol

My god, they charge you per overdraft? Here for debit cards it works out that if youre still under within a month, theyll charge you something like £25. Credit cards work about the same as they do across the pond i think.

Already there matey. Gvt is already trying to change this.

Oh, the keyword here is not YOUR interest. So far I know the __law__ regulates that if you work you have to have an bank account so that you can receive your money over it. They are who can give you your money and you pay them certain percent for that (after you already paid 20% to the country). Practically you pay the bank to give you your money, and if you don't do it so, you're outlaw. You don't have income - you do not need an account. You lose your job, account gets closed. You get new job, you need to pay to open one.

So far I know they can give you interest too, but (1) it is very very low - let say up to 2% on the year level, (2) if you drop some money there, be sure that you won't need it in the next one-two years. In that time you won't have right to request a penny of it under any terms. (3) I am pretty sure there is a minimal quota (let say 1000€) that you have to put there in order to be able to ask for interest.


That was huge money waste for many families in Croatia and Serbia. For mine too. What they owe us by now could ensure schooling in the best schools while living in best apartments, eating the best food and driving very solid car.

Man that sucks.

I have a regular acount that pays around 1%+ interest.
A flexi savings acount that pays between 3-4% average, but is withdrawable at any time.
An ISA which gives just short of 5% but I can only credit it with £3000 per year and if I withdraw I can't deposit any more for 1 year. However, I've a work around on that! haha!

The interest up to a certain value is tax free, after that a very low amount of tax.

In theory If I had £3000 in each acount I could be earning short of £300 per year, just for having money.

Income tax sucks the big one. I understand why we have it an all, but 17.5% is a lot of money. Then, they council tax you (Aprox £100 per month) and of course you pay tax on everything you buy too.

What a pile of shit! I decided that money whilst it does need to be taxed (but not to the value it is) should only be allowed to be taxed once - when it comes in to your bank account. Not taxed, then council taxed, then whatever taxed.

At the end of the day my dad worked it out at something crazy like his in come is about £32,000 a year (not bad!) but he only actually ever sees aprx £20,000 a year.

Where does that money go? To Tony Blair and co so they can buy new cars, spend 50% of the year on holidy and smoke fat cigars.

Bunch of prats.

Well, taxes go in a gazillion things, so hard to say to what exactly. Let's just say: all the stuff that nobody wants to do for free and gets done anyway, that's where taxes go.

I don't mind taxes, if they payoff (ie the result of the taxes) is ok. But then I make shit all.

Well the thing is all the admin people can look up the times and IP address satis and I post and see two entities - plus satis mispelling words - the horror.... and banks suck - but I think I am better at finding banks than satis is - he is lazy lmao......

Well in some countries the income tax is based on earnings. The more you earn the more you pay. But the thing is, those who earn more, they do not use public goods more, more likely they use less. So in the end they pay more to use less. Kinda makes you wanna shoot those politicians doesnt it. Hopefully that kind of shit stays away from Estonia or I swear ill move to Finland.

I'm just glad I'm a student and I don't want to face the big scary world yet. Although I have about £9000 still to give back to the government........

England is like that.

The US is like that too.

There are arguments for a tiered tax system, though. If you make $12,000 / year, you'll probably be paying x amount per year for stuff you can't not have... like bread and milk and basic crap like that. Call it $3000/year. Then there are the other expenses you can't get around, like electricity, housing, etc. Call it another $6000/year. So $9,000/year goes to stuff you can't really not pay without dying or being homeless.

Meanwhile, the guy that's making $50,000/year, he pays about the same. $9,000 that he can't get away from, plus additional money for luxury stuff that he could do without.

$9,000 of $12,000 is 75% of the poor guy's income. It's only 18% of the $50k's income. So the poor guy really can't pay much in taxes... he only has 25% of his income to play with that, and most of that probably goes to stuff like clothes and doctors and crap like that.

Hence the tiered tax system. The person with more money can afford it more, so he pays more. Yay. Except that, as mentioned above, the guy with money is less likely to be sitting on government-assisted housing, eating government food and using government-funded medical care, which we all pay for. My taxes are insane. I believe it's somewhere around 25% to 33% taxes on my income (federal), plus a ~8.5% sales tax on everything I buy. I'm not a homeowner or I'd pay property tax too. Plus all the gasoline tax and cigarette taxes, not that I smoke or drive alot.

It's kinda funny...my country was founded on a bunch of people not wanting to pay taxes, and now our leaders are taxing the shit out of us. I feel like breaking into a port somewhere and dumping all their freakin' electronics into the ocean. While dressed as Indians.

But then theres the freedom of choice and the concept of equalness. Its not the fault of the other guy that he makes more money, its just that he got off his lazy butt and did something .

Now that could be countered with the argumant of unequal start. But hardly anything is fair in life and there are hundreds of occasions where poorer people break out of poverty by applying the right measures at the right time, so in the end its really up to the person wether he is gonna get some dough or parasite on the wellfare.

I agree. But when 80% of your voter base is really poor (New Orleans), do you really want to preach political ideas that screw the poor people? You'll never win there. It's all about politics.

"It's politics man, politics."

There's a need for taxes and there's a need for the rich to give to the poor. If they wouldn't, you'd create a society with a small, very rich top layer and a large, poor bottom layer and little or no middle class. And as you might know, the middle classes are what make society work. That's why all civilized countries have a large middle class population and why banana republics are all about a happy few rich. Banana republics are the result of the rich not having to give anything to the poor, believe it or not.

Now, the system isn't perfect. The idea, of course, is to give everyone a good basic quality of life and a chance to go beyond what they started with. Or to act as a safety net for people who are fired until the find a new job, so that they can still feed their families and pay their bills while on the dole. The system is meant to give everyone their 'turn' to be rich, but is inherently flawed because of the existence of generational richess and poverty. Ie, groups who are either so rich or so poor that they don't stand much of a chance of becoming poorer/richer so they don't make the system 'work'. They just perpetuate their own existence.

There being flaws in the system doesn't mean the system is crap. Lesser of evils and all. And hell yeah that the rich should pay more than the poor! If you make 30.000 bucks a month and have to pay 5% more taxes than someone who makes 2000 a month, you will still (and by a huge margin) be the person who feels it the least in his wallet. of course this all needs to stay within certain margins, or you dissuade people to work hard and earn more money. But a certain extra is feasable.

Oh and ppl who make use of public services typically don't want to. Well, the housing perhaps. But the schools? The health services? Shit, you'd have to be a downright jackass to LIKE to use those. Let's not forget either that many rich ppl are rich from exploiting the poor, directly or indirectly. That reminds me of a documentary of short-term loans in the US: because of the credit system, poor people can't get regular loans from banks so they turn to places who will loan them (small amounts) of cash over a short period of time at massive interest rates. Most of them need the money to bridge up to next month and can't go anywhere else so...and of course the cycle only gets worse as they are inevitably making losses over the entire matter. The fact that most poor people have little or no education or a decent grasp of financial matters only worsens the problem.


Meh. So anyway, there's a reason why it all exists. It's not just to make the politicians rich(er).