already said I had trouble understanding the T&Cs or the account itself. why need to be what clause or not?
Because 3 out of 4 of your questions was clearly and directly answered by the T&C. (a/c/d).
While (a) might have required you to actually think a little, (c) and (d) did not.
Simply put, I read and didn't understand everything about how the account worked the first read.
Was Citi's
website about MaxiGain so hard to understand how the account works?
The basic overview of the account is explained there. The detailed explanation is in the T&C.
If these two sources of information was not able to clearly explain to someone how the account generally works, no amount of explanation by a human staff would have helped them.
Generally, the other questions people here have relate to how to min-max the account, which actually requires them to think. It's not something that can easily be explained, and even when we spell it out, they get the simplest concepts wrong - concepts that have already been written out and were explained clearly by the above. (eg: bonus interest is the lowest balance of the previous month... interest is calculated daily and posted monthly... why is Citi's SIBOR value different from what I can find online... etc)
And, as others have explained, the efforts to min-max is really just a few cents in interest difference, so it really doesn't matter (unless you're trying to push $100million into the account - people with such resources however tend to either (a) not care, or (b) are able to figure it out). Just open the account, is the overall recommendation.
The other main issue is, people who are having trouble opening the account, because bank staff throws up some random rumor to discourage them. This thread has been shooting those rumors down, advising people on how to insist opening the account, and not worry about those rumors as they're generally baseless.
That's all there is to it. You can say the T&Cs explained this and can pinpoint every single clause that explains what I didn't understand, so what?
So what? So then it becomes clear that you didn't even try to read the document, at the time when you were unsure about those answers - because if you did, you would have the answers to most of your questions (3 out of 4).
It's the same like saying insurance plans have T&Cs that explained everything so clearly with benefit illustrations and even more examples and yet people also don't understand. They don't even understand what kind of illnesses they can claim for when EVERYTHING is listed clearly in their premium booklet.
Apples and oranges. Citi's MaxiGain T&C is not like an insurance plan T&C. It's only 2 pages long, of which almost 1 page is worked examples. It's one of the few T&Cs that is actually *easy* to understand, if you stopped to read it. It does not use legal jargon (with the exception of p.a.; which isn't really a concept that this document needs to address).
TLDR: Just because an article explains everything clearly, doesn't mean everyone will be able to understand the article on the first read. Not everyone is as smart or as savvy as you guys. That's all I am saying.
And, what I am saying is, anyone who can't understand it, is highly likely to also misunderstand the explanation by a bank staff. Hence, the bank staff would have to resort to a simplified (but slightly inaccurate) explanation, like what the website does.
Then people go off on these forums how they received bad info - when the problem really is simply them not being able to understand what they were told.
If someone wants the details on how to min-max this account, they can simply blindly follow the advice of the people on this thread. But if they want to check for themselves *why* those recommendations are made (which is a good thing to do, because some of the recommendations here are a little misguided), they need to read and understand the T&C - a short document that is really just one page long.
You, on the other hand, have posted one useful piece of information - which I had already posted twice before, and then a whole tirade of how difficult the T&C was to understand (when it actually isn't) and picking a bone with people who recommend others to read it, as it directly answers the questions they are asking.
Get off your high horse, and don't think that you're the only person who is being helpful here. Others are posting constructive information that are generally trying to help others too - except, one of the best recommendations has always been "read the T&C" for questions that are *directly* answered by that document. Instead, your insistence that it is difficult to understand is actually counter productive - especially when you refuse to point out what is difficult in that document, so that we can help others who may have similar confusion on those parts.
Hence my question: Which clauses did you have trouble understanding; because if you can point some of those out, we would then be able use that as a base on how to advise and clarify the confusion over it; but it's quite easy to understand, and so we don't know how to further advise than 'read the T&C'.
That said, there is actually a loophole (error) in the T&C, which can be exploited if you care to shuffle money around at account opening to try gain an extra $1 from the bank (it's in pt 6). Chances are it won't pay off, and the efforts to wrangle that $1 from the bank would far exceed that amount.