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Multiple UK student accounts

Tue, 23 Aug 2005
The student market is a large one for banks and they home in on soon to be freshers knowing that they will max out their overdrafts, credit cards and anything else given to. Why is this good you ask? Because as soon as you finish uni the interest will raise like a salmon and you will most likely spend the rest of your lives banking with them.

Some student accounts require your student loan to be paid into the account in order for the overdraft to be activated. So if you are planning on opening multiple accounts and engrossing yourself in multiple overdrafts, which will most likely end up with multiple broken limbs when the debt collectors come round with multiple bats, then this may be a spanner in your works.

But don’t fret, you only really need one account anyway and out of the 8 or 10 banks that offer student accounts there are only a couple that really stand out so the choice isn’t as big as it may appear.

Cards

Unless your bank is in the style of duck-tales and you just pick up your daily allowance of gold each morning you are probably going to need some form of plastic? The two main cards banks tend to offer are debit cards and credit cards; do not get these confused as they are very different.

Credit cards offer the consumer credit believe it or not. This means you purchase your goods using the banks money, whoopee, but then you pay it back to them and if you don’t pay it back quick time they start throwing on interest, doh!

Stay clear of banks credit cards and go for a credit card company such as egg or capital one. This is of course assuming you really do need one! Credit card companies tend to offer lower interest rates, long interest free periods on balance transfers and interest free periods on new purchases.