UK Landlord Forum / Life

What do you think? Worth paying the extra for or not?

https://gocardless.com/guides/posts/how-landlords-use-dd/

£2 per transaction would not be for me.

£2 is a minimum charge. It's 1% of the rent.

£5.85 for my current rental works out to £70.20 for a year.

You've read it wrong - "All it costs is 1% per transaction, capped at £2." - so it's £2.

Thanks. That's a better deal then I thought.

Yeah, I just saved you a load of money! 

Lol. For £2 a month it sounds worthwhile.

As recipient of the rent, if you have a good payer, then it makes not one jot of difference to you how it arrives in your account. It could be Standing Order, Direct Debit, ad hoc Faster Payment or paid in at Branch.

If it's being paid in correctly and on-time, then you have zero to worry about.

There's no benefit to you in having it arrive via Direct Debit in that case... as the spiel says, you would still need to check your account to verify the funds have gone in (if you're not going to just assume they have)... however, it also seems to say you can be notified if funds have not gone in, but - again - that's a feature of the negative side, which is not what we're talking about.

If your Tenants are regular and reliable then there's no real benefit to you that I can see... you're just paying £2 out for each transaction.

The idea here is that there might be some benefit for those Tenants who are not regular and reliable. But my view of the world says that it is an unlikely Tenant who would sign up to this if they thought they were an irregular and unreliable Tenant or things were so tight that they like to have control over when, exactly, they pay their rent. I think Tenants of that ilk could easily get into a bit of trouble. You are concerned about your rent, rightly so, whereas they have other things to worry about as well (not correct, as rent is a priority debt) but a fact of life... mobile phone top-up, ciggies, petrol for the car, new Lego set for the kiddie.

I would be happy if all my Tenants paid by Standing Order (that would give me the confidence that they have the confidence that there would be that money available each month)... I am not there yet... I'm five sixths of the way there to be exact.