Can you pay a mortgage deposit via Faster Payments?

[SuperScrimper]

Can anyone settle an argument between DH and I? friends are buying a house and need to pay their deposit to the solicitor, they were complaining they would need to pay a CHAPS charge. I said I would just transfer 9 lots of £10000 and save on the fees. DH said you can do that, and must pay by CHAPS.

As never of us have a house, have ever had a house, nor are likely to neither of us actually know for sure. I can just see why our friends should have to pay to transfer their own money

Can't speak for now, but when I worked in a bank, it was frowned upon; the bank/solicitor is looking for £xxxx.xx coming in, so sometimes discounts the 8 payments of £yyy.yy and thus payments take longer and hold up the process.

Also a CHAPS payment delivers a payment notification advice to the solicitor so it's all in writing.

Oh....I didn't think of that. The whole house buying process seems designed to screw as much money out of you as possible. I was slightly horrified when I heard about their stamp duty!

If you had money in a few different accounts, though, you would be able to send say £20000 from each into one main account and do that CHAPS from that one though, wouldn't you? You would have to pay for the CHAPS for each account just to go into the central account?

Yep we did exactly that. We had to do it over a few days because of the limits. Sols just mailed us as money arrived

The cost of CHAPS is small compared to the cost of the house even the size of the desposit. 90K is a lot of money. Using CHAPS is like recorded and signed delivery. CHAPs is about £35 from what I remember.

I refuse to pay for chapps or bacs transfers now - its ridiculous now with internet banking and faster payments!

but a direct faster payment costs nothing - just make sure you get the destination sort code and account right! even if you did do it wrong, you can ask for it to be recalled

It might depend on your bank but Lloyds had a very low limit for FP like 25k or something so I had to pay for CHAPS

yes you have to do multiple goes of the minimum amount. I just object to paying the banks anmore than they already get in account charges, interest, OD charges etc - esp as I know the (lack) if effort involved on their part (all automated systems)

If you set up a new payment mandate it may have to go through additional security checks,the same with a payment for such a substantial amount...Id not risk the payment being held up incase it impacted the sale.

if you use online banking only the security checks are done at the time with a card reader or text pass code, at the 3 banks I have current accounts with anyway.

I have often tx multiples of 10000 with no issues.

How often do you buy a house? Exchanging contracts is stressful enough. Why take the risk of a bank transfer going wrong to save £35.