Of financial irritants

It’s been a period of financial woes and irritants, not unlike an astrologer’s prediction of a turbulent financial phase coming true.

SixtyOne days after quitting the company, sixteen reminder mails later, (Curiously, mails are replied to only when they are ‘cc’ed to all the higher ups in all the relevant departments thus exhibiting one’s intention to escalate the issue. Unfailingly in each of the replies‘inconvenience caused is deeply regretted’ appears at the bottom. Only that nothing is actually done to mitigate the inconvenience.) I finally receive the full and final settlement.

The courier guy knocks on the door with an envelope bearing that familiar company logo, 8 hours after I lay restlessly in my bed till 2 am drafting a nasty letter in my mind which would question the company’s professional ethics, accountability and lack of concern for a former employee and hinting if I had erred by not suggesting in any of those mails that I was prepared to offer kickbacks for sending across my cheque without further delay.

I jumped for joy and felt ashamed for the nasty thoughts I had harboured 8 hours earlier while signing to confirm the receipt of the envelope.

Alas the joy was short lived and those nasty thoughts returned.

In the Final settlement, my January’s salary continued to be withheld!
More horror was revealed on careful inspection of the document: an obscene amount of money has been paid to Chidambaram and Co as TDS.

I had worked for barely three and a half months to make ends meet for the next 12 months of unemployment. But folks at the accounting dept in Bombay had conveniently ignored my written statement, which said that I hadn’t worked in the last two years and that I did not intend to work for another 10 months, which should have made it clear to them that my income would fall short of the tax threshold. Instead, they generously deducted a huge sum of amount as tax, extrapolating my salary over a 12 month period!. (A prior knowledge of their queer tax computation would have made me submit the LIC premiums paid by dad to claim tax relief)

Was any of the sixteen mails I exchanged with them not polite enough for them to withhold my January’s salary and to deduct the huge amount as tax??!!

Mutual funds investments cause excessive anxiety and loss of peace of mind.

But who can resist the lure of the stock markets when they have taken a plunge from their astronomical heights of early Jan, besides I have always been feeling awkward about the fact that despite my management degree and all, I hadn’t explored the stock market. What with tall tales of semi literate housewives of Bangalore magically converting 5000 into 500000, I have lately begun to question if I was MBA enough?

Having ridden the highs with the markets right from 2005 and having made a windfall, a friend not working in the IT industry, had recently confided that has been of late contemplating buying flats in Bombay and Bangalore!!

By the time I make enough and think about serious heavy investments, the stocks markets would have recovered and the indices would be back to their dizzying heights. So the time to act was now, when indices had taken a 25 % hit from their all time highs.

So off I head to DSP Merrill Lynch and hand over a cheque to join the party. The account statement was promised in a week’s to ten days’ time. Fifteen days later I call up their call centre to be put through an infinite loop repeatedly.
“Your call is important to us, unfortunately all our officers are busy attending to calls. Please stay on the line. Your call will be attended to shortly”.
Six minutes later the voice urges me to put down the phone and call again later.
This drill is repeated twice more and I give up in frustration.

Next I try the mail route. I sent an elaborate mail with the application no, the cheque no /date and such other details. They revert asking for my PAN. I Comply. They revert asking for my name. I furnish the same; that was the last I heard from them.

I am still nervously waiting for the Account Statement.

Over and above the 0.3% Citibank charges for clearing an outstation cheque, I notice that an extra amount has been deducted from my account as charges for the ‘Drawee Bank’

The phone-banker lady is unable to offer a convincing explanation. I e-mail the customer relation ship manager who replies saying that 0.3 % percentage charge is a standard service charge deduction for cheque clearance conveniently sidestepping the real issue. I persist, explaining that it was not the standard 0.3 % cheque clearance charge that was bothering me, but the amount that has been paid to the ‘drawee bank’ that was deducted from my account without my authorization.

It’s really not an astronomical figure, really. My concern is an amount getting deducted from my account that is not part of a declared service charge without my authorization.

Later in the afternoon I receive the quarterly statement of transactions from ICICI bank, only to realize they had deducted an extra thousand rupees above the cheque value that I had issued way back in January!!

Hail Murphy. If something can go wrong, it will.