What happens in the instance you have two current accounts with hsbc and the balance after bills?
Does it balance of them, or just one? Or do you get to pick?
I don’t know whether this is just coincidence or not but within a few days of starting to use my HSBC Premier account again (by transferring some direct debits) I’ve received the email warning that I don’t meet the requirements for Premier and must take action because they will “soon” downgrade me if I don’t. There’s no time period mentioned but from previous emails I think 3 months was mentioned. It says that they will contact me before any action is taken.
Doesn’t matter because I’ve started the ISA transfers now and the S&S ISA is transferring as cash, so shouldn’t take more than a couple of weeks.
That’s really interesting.
Did the email indicate what the Premier requirements were from a monthly salary perspective, or did they just refer to the criteria e.g. 100k salary etc.
It just referred to the (gross) annual salary. I’ve seen mentioned somewhere that it’s an equivalent monthly salary of just over £5000. It has to be from a salary paid directly from your employer into your account, though - you can’t just transfer the amount in and out every month like with Lloyds Premier.
These ones even have no mention of a salary requirement
I swear Lloyds Premier is a account anyone can have its just expensive if you dont meet their requirements.
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HSBC Premier requires £5,100 per month.
Worth noting that a £100k salary is approx £5,700 per month after tax, but that’s before you factor in pension contributions and student loans, hence why they use a lower figure.
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And child/spouse maintenance 
To be fair, £5,100 does seem a little high if the headline annual salary is £100k. Even with a modest pension contribution percentage and/or a Student Loan, you wouldn’t hit £5k.
Unsure how it would work for those of us who receive most of our income as dividends via an Ltd. It’s not technically “salary”, which is the word they use in the criteria.
Thankfully not an issue for me. No children and never married. 
I would guess the £5,100 figure is factoring in a pension contribution of 12%, which would bring the net pay down to £5,113.
In that case, it doesn’t seem unreasonable. I can see why they raised the minimum from £75k to £100k. Even at £100k, that’s still almost 2 million people who would be eligible in the UK.
Barclays did the same years ago. You could pay £25 per month instead of meeting the criteria.
Unsure if that’s still the case.
It’s just a clever way to sell more packaged accounts, using “Premier” as a pull.
Who’s paying that? Basic is 5%. The rest likely goes into SIPP.
You would generally contribute whatever percentage your employer is willing to match.
This will always be a better idea than contributing the minimum and the rest via SIPP.
If your employer is only willing to do the minimum, then yes. My last employed job was 10/10.
Salary sacrifice
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Not every employer offers this, I know HNW people whose employer refuses to increase their offering.
Also not always an option.
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Well, of course. Plenty do offer it, plenty don’t.
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Salary sacrifice might not always be an option, but it is an option, so it applies to the original question of “who would do this”.
In my limited experience I have always had this option though, so probably depends on the industry and/or company scale.
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Exactly.
I’ve never had a job that didn’t offer a match. My last employed job was 10%/10%.
I guess it must be less common in some sectors.
I think we might be talking about different things.
I was referring to the situation where a salary sacrifice pension contribution is available, which means that it makes more sense to increase your contribution as opposed to just contributing minimum percentage and then topping up SIPP. I definitely wouldn’t want to have yet another app for a different provider and to faff with claiming back taxes from HMRC.
In this situation the size of employer match doesn’t really matter. Mine is currently 4/8 but I sacrifice more than 4. I have heard of some really great matching of like 12/15 though! Ultimately it’s just a part of TC (total comp).
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