I didn’t buy a house on Saturday. Despite assistance, I was outmanoevred. It does strike me that the auction process is not dissimilar to professional poker.

Anyway in preparation for the auction, I needed to be ready to pay a 10% deposit of (argh) tens of thousands of dollars by cheque. So last week I moved a heap of money from my St George DragonDirect account (which is fee-free and has pays pretty good interest) into my Commonwealth Bank account (which I use for every day stuff, and has a chequebook attached).

St George will let you do this in hits of up to $100,000 per day. All good.

Commonwealth, however… They limit you to $5,000 per day by electronic banking. And though their Netbank teases you by implying you can get that limit raised, when I rang up to get it done, they told me you can’t. $5K is it ($10K from business accounts). Their alternative involves going into the branch and either buying a bank cheque (which means then going into a St George bank branch to get the money in… like I have time for that), or doing a slow-but-cheap electronic transfer which will cost about $4 and take a WEEK. Or paying a $28 fee to transfer the money electronically instantly.

Apart from not really having the time, I’m not going to give them the satisfaction of that. I’ll trickle it back to St George, $5K a day. And it’s time to find out if St George can do chequebooks. ‘Cos this is ridiculous. WTF did they build electronic banking for anyway if they force you to go into the branch for stuff like this?