If you want to find out how to stop the banks from taking advantage of you through errors and faulty systems, then keep your eyes glued to this page for the next 3 minutes; you are in for some shocking surprises.  New Mortgage Calculator – Find Errors in Your Bank Statements and Stop Loan Interest Rip Offs.

"Banks do make mistakes with mortgages.
And very few are in the customers favour."
- Prue Moodie, Australian Financial Review

"It would be naive to think there’s such a thing as a perfect system, and that mistakes will never happen. Mistakes are a fact of life and I am not suggesting that banks intentionally do anything wrong….. "
– Paul Clitheroe – Host of Channel 9’s Money show and chief commentator for Money magazine

"The era of trusting the banks has long gone."
– Justice Clarke, New South Wales Supreme Court.

You are about to discover a "secret" your bank manager would love to keep secret.

If you aren’t checking your past and present bank statements for mistakes then you could be throwing away thousands of hard earned dollars …. totally unnecessarily.

Worse still, these errors are compounding every year so they would be costing you more and more as time goes by.
 
The banks have probably already overcharged you many times this year without even knowing it!

"I have found errors in some cases over hundred dollars on my monthly statements, ….. which has added up to over $14,000.00. Thanks for the program"

Grant Redding – Nerang, QLD

"I have checked 2 mortgages and I have another 8 or 10 loans to go. So far I have found an overcharge of $5,156.29 and then $684.98 for compounded interest. The loan started in September 2002 and is still in place. So thank you for the programme, it will help make my money work for me rather than be used by the bank free of charge. "

Edward Nixon – Hahndorf, SA.

“Your software has uncovered overcharging by my bank to the tune of almost $1,300 just for the last two years. Like so many others, I had assumed the Bank would get the figures correct.”

Mike V – Bungendore, NSW

"We found a discrepancy of $8,643.00 on our fixed loan and this has now saved us $33,000 over the life of our loan."

Mrs. Mackenzie – Logan City, QLD.

I don’t know about you, but I work hard to pay off my mortgage as quickly as possible. Then to have the bank make mistakes and incorrectly take money from my account is not only unfair, but insulting.

I can’t believe how totally naive I had been, just accepting that the banks never actually made a mistake and my statements were 100% accurate. Now surely these mistakes are just tiny errors involving a few cents here and there? Well guess again.

Banks Are Making Mistakes On Accounts Just Like Yours …. Every Day.

"Since I started using the MortgageWatchdog software, I’ve found month-to-month discrepancies of up to $3,000 a month."

Gregory Dominish, Beacon Hill, NSW

"15 years ago a bank forgot to credit our account over $5,000.00 which we deposited.

This could happen to anyone. Thankfully we got our money back and an apology … but a simple apology doesn’t seem enough when it involves such large sums of money.

Janine Thurgood – Ocean Shores, NSW
 

"We had been concerned about our loan for a while – there seemed to be a number of strange things happening. MortgageWatchdog found that because of an error on our offset account, we had been overcharged $3,517.57 and this was on a loan that is only $66,000 and was only over a 10 month period!

MortgageWatchdog also calculated that we were owed an additional $136.74 in compounded interest on this error – so, a total of $3,654.31. We also found a second error where some repayments had gone to the wrong place – this was another $5,830.00.

So, the total error came to $9,484.31 – all in only a 10 month period.

If these errors had not been detected, we would have paid approximately an extra $55,000 in interest over the life of the loan".

- Bayley and Carolyn Vincent – Barden Ridge, NSW

If you are like many people you may be tempted to think that "this can’t happen to me" or that this "isn’t a real problem and it’s being blown out of proportion." Before you make that mistake think about this.

Recently a major Australian bank found they had overcharged fees on 55,000 customer’s accounts and it totalled $52,000,000. That’s right $52 million dollars.

That’s an average of $945 for each person.

What I find pretty amazing about this is that the bank found the problem NOT the customers. That means that fifty five thousand people didn’t notice the best part of one thousand dollars missing from their bank account.

You may be thinking "I know I’d sure notice $1,000 missing from my account." … but I bet right now that if you called those 55,000 people mentioned above they’d have said exactly the same thing before the bank informed them of the little blunder they made on their account.

So why didn’t they notice the $945 overcharges?

The problem is that bank statements can be difficult to read and are not always what they seem. Some of the errors are very difficult to locate if you don’t know what to look for.

"[In accounts for over 20 of my clients] I have discovered overcharges in approximately 75% of cases. The total of all mistakes, including overcharges of interest, fees and other irregularities amounts to over $500,000"
– Joe Naggy former Citibank executive now runs Midmark Financial Services

“The incidence of error is extremely high. We recently checked 282 normal statements and 152 of those were incorrect. It really is alarming.”
- John Scilly former executive with Advance Bank

“A recent survey of bank statements conducted by The Interest Savers for Sydney Morning Herald readers showed an error rate of 54%, ……. The Herald’s switchboard was jammed for a week by callers wanting their statements checked.”
- Journal of The Institute of Chartered Accountants in Australia

"The bank statements are never clean, [citing the experience of some 350 clients since IRB opened in 1994]. "Significant errors" occurred in 90% of statements.."
- Roy Brown Managing Director of IRB

There is a way to keep the banks honest. We now have a simple and powerful tool to check our bank statements quickly, easily and most importantly 100% accurately - Mortgage Watchdog.

But is it worth it? How often do these mistakes happen? Unfortunately, it is far more often than you would think.

A former Commonwealth Bank officer, Martin McKenna, has found that …

only one in 70 cases he has examined involves the undercharging of interest

the other 69 have all been overcharged. 

That gets you thinking about these "mistakes" when it favours the lender that much doesn’t it!

"The average error is about $242 per monthly statement. Hundreds of thousands of Australians are potentially affected”
The Daily Telegraph

Staggering isn’t it? When I discovered the rate at which banks made mistakes I was stunned but assumed it must have just been a few dollars here and there; $242 dollars per monthly statement is incredible. 

So what does this all mean? What does it add up to? You do your own sums, but here is what the statistics (and the most conservative ones at that) had me thinking when I first discovered them …  

Annual statements: 12

Statements with errors: 6 (12 x 54%)

Mistakes in lenders favour: 84%

Number of statements with errors in banks favour: 5 (6 x 84%)

Average monthly statement error: $242

This tells me that on average the interest they overcharge in one year on your loan account is $1,210.00  Ouch!

Don’t get angry, get even….. get back what they owe you.

There is something you can do about this, you don’t have to be a helpless victim of the banking system. Average homeowners around Australia are getting their money back from the banks every day. There are thousands of real life examples of people who have been over charged and been repaid anything from $500 to $130,000.

You may remember these stories that made the newspapers.

The Sun Herald – George De Costa – Petersham Accountant. Had his statements checked and found he was overcharged $26,500.
Daily Telegraph – Grahame Hostein – Glouster NSW Checked his loan and discovered he was owed $130,000.

"I all the time had a feeling that my home loan bank statements were incorrect. I did not know how to calculate or prove that there are discrepancies until I heard about the Mortgage Watchdog program. I found the software easy to use and I discovered that my bank owes me around $500."

Barak – Canberra, ACT
 
"….I am due a refund of approximately. $5,000.00. Which will do nicely for my overseas trip I am planning next March."

Angela Fulton – Reservoir, Victoria

"Thanks everyone. I’ve just found $1,100.00 over the last 3 years owing to me from my bank in overcharged interest on a home and investment loan. They were totally shocked with being caught!"

Steve Atkin – Port Macquarie, NSW

The bad news is that knowledge is a dangerous thing. Knowing what you now know, you have to some extent cornered yourself into making an important decision. You will decide one way or another how you are going to deal with it. Before leaving this page you will select one of the following alternatives…even if you think you haven’t decided.

Option 1: The first alternative is to either "think about it" or continue doing nothing and have the banks take advantage of you to the tune of  $1,210 a year on average. I suppose this is the ostrich approach, stick your head in the sand and hope it goes away, good luck with this one, you’re going to need it. 

Option 2: Pay a bank statement checking company (like IRB mentioned above) to check for you. The interesting thing to note about these companies existence is that obviously bank errors occur often enough for these guys to make a pretty healthy full time income (keep that in mind if you are leaning toward the option above). The down side is that they charge $55 per monthly statement to check for you and a 20% "success fee" on the bank’s refund. So the costs you are looking at are $55 x 12 = $660 plus  $1210 x 20% = $242 (20% of the refund)  Total Cost = $902 each year.

Option 3: Ask the the very people who got it wrong in the first place – the banks – to check your statements for you. Generally they charge $200/hour to do this for you. Ask yourself this question, "why would I trust them to get it right this time if they couldn’t before?" Isn’t this a bit like putting the fox in charge of the hen house?

Option 4: Use a dedicated piece of software using the internationally accepted formula to calculate your interest bill to check on the banks for you …. for less than the banks’ hourly rate.

It is a bit of a "no brainer" isn’t it? The Mortgage Watchdog software is by far the most cost-effective solution available.

To do nothing is either naive or nuts, as is paying the bank to check your statements for you. Paying a firm to do it for you isn’t a bad option but if you want to dig through 6 years worth of statements at $55 a month you are looking at $3,960 plus 20% of the overcharges they find. Why not use the same kind of software these firms use to find banking errors every day for a fraction of the cost?

Undoubtedly you will have seen countless exposés about the banks on TV programs including Channel 7’s "Today Tonight", Channel 9’s "Money" and "a Current Affair", plus The ABC’s "4 Corners", "7.30 Report" and "Sunrise".

"Banks get almost every interest calculation on mortgages and overdrafts wrong at some point."
- Roy Brown Managing Director of Interest Research Bureau (IRB).

In this recession times, author wants you to recover your extra money taken by bank. I believe so strongly that you need to check your bank statements. If you aren’t checking your past and present bank statements for mistakes then you could be throwing away thousands of hard earned dollars …. totally unnecessarily. Act today and save your hard earned money. Banks get almost every interest calculation on mortgages and overdrafts wrong at some point. Visit http://makefriendsandmoney.com/go/mortgagewatchdog.php to download your mortgage watchdog software and identify Errors in Your Bank statements  using this innovative Mortgage Calculator.

"The era of trusting the banks has long gone."
– Justice Clarke, New South Wales Supreme Court.