Getting annoyed by the bank

Today I found a couple of articles on articlesbase to add to my photo tips website, then had to find photos on flickr to illustrate them. I also did various odd-jobs - gluing rubber back on tripod leg locks, filling up the bird feeder, filling up the pond, putting the washing out, tidying up the Halloween figures, vacuuming.

Although I had gone out specially to buy lots of bird seed before we went away, it seems no-one could be bothered to feed the birds. Likewise, the pond was quite empty, with the water level gone down part-way in the deep hole in the middle of the pond. I guess it does go to show that it's a good thing I do these tasks normally, otherwise they'd never get done.

I went to the bank in the morning to close some ISAs with the Nationwide as they were only paying 0.25% interest. Because they were old Portman accounts they said it would take some time. So I had to go back in the afternoon to collect the cheques and pay them into Alliance & Leicester / Santander, which is just a couple of shops down the road from Nationwide.

In Santander the bloke annoyingly was trying to get me to take out a savings account to put the money into. They can never let you just pay money into or take money out of an account, always have to try and sell you a mortgage or something. When I got home I checked the share prices of Santander, and found they have fallen by 35% over the past year.

So if you had put your money in a Santander savings account, you would probably have got something like 0 - 3% interest paid over the past year. But if instead you'd shorted their shares, you would have got 35%. Of course, you could also loose quite a bit of money by shorting their shares if instead the price went up. So while 35% is a great return, I think I'll just keep the money in cash for the moment.

I also managed to finish checking through all my emails, though there are still about 50 I haven't read (but I know they're not urgent).