Choose a student bank account

Date: 10/09/2003

A table from MSN money made it pretty easy to compare accounts

Having received a letter from the Student Loan Company, updating my course details, I thought it was probably time to look at student bank accounts. Firstly I looked at the MSN Money Student accounts table 2003, and printed off a copy to write on.

This table showed all the banks which offered student accounts along with overdraft rates, types of banking, cards available, freebies and interest rates. I decided not to worry too much about the overdraft rates, as I already had quite a bit of savings and hopefully my parents were going to help me out with the money. I also didn't consider the interest rates because I had another savings account with a higher rate of interest which I could use.

Every bank in the table provided both phone and internet banking, so not much to choose from there, this just left the types of credit, debit and cheque guarantee cards that came with the account and the freebies. As long as I got a debit card, that didn't matter to much either, which just left the freebies to consider.

The best deals seemed to be Barclays (Waterstones and HMV vouchers), HSBC (railcard or £50 cash) and Natwest (£40/60 cash). There was also another factor to consider - which banks would be near to me at Essex. It turned out that there was a Barclays and a Lloyds TSB on campus, so one of these banks looked good, also there was a Waterstones bookshop there so if I went with Barclays I could spend my vouchers there. With this in mind I had pretty much decided on Barclays, though the cash incentives offered by Natwest and HSBC looked pretty good too.