I have been a Commonwealth Bank customer for a while now, and recently I walked into the La Trobe branch to ask them a few questions about one of their financial products. For privacy reasons, I cannot mention the type of financial service I enquired about. I did sign up to it though on the spot though.
The thing is, I did my sums before approaching the bank staff. Their website is quite informative, and if there is ever a time to read fine print - it’s when you sign up to financial products.
One way to test whether the person whom you are liaising with knows their stuff is to question them on the fine print. When I sign up to any product, I go straight to the fine print - the Conditions Apply, or Important Information section. If I am not sure, then I go to the business and ask the staff there what it means. Basically, if they do not know - or need to ask their boss, you know where they stand with their product.
Putting this principle into practice today, the bank staff was able to have a quick read of the fine print and explain to me clearly what it meant. Now, I also read it before I went there, and what she told me was exactly how I interpreted it.
Two things came out of this: 1) My interpretation was correct, 2) The bank’s interpretation was correct. Therefore if things do go wrong on that fine print, I have a leg to stand on. Many times I note people do not read things before signing up to contracts etc, and this is a huge risk especially in today’s volatile financial markets. You could lose a lot of money. So read everything, and it WILL take you a while - but better to do so, than to lose hard earned money on a whim.
Anything not mentioned in the fine print is up for grabs, as you may have found with my Virgin Broadband experience. Read the follow up here.
