Carnet Bank Gurantee - Barclays - My Experience
 

Just thought I'd share my recent experience with applying for a bank Gurantee for the Carnet de Passages.

My vehicle is worth about £1500 and I'm planning to travel through countries with a 500% import tax bracket so a maximum liability of £7500.

Using RL Davison via the RAC for an insurance indemnity I'd the looking at 10% premium subject to 8% insurance tax with 50% refundable one the carnet is discharged. Total = £ 795 with £ 375 returnable.

I popped into my local Barclays branch (in Selby) and asked about the Gurantee. The manager had actually heard of it and produced a form within 5 minutes!!!!!!

Anyway, down to the costs. £50 set-up plus 1.5% per annum minimum £150.

BARGAIN!!!!

Carnet cost
 

Hi

I've been quoted around £3000 for a £4500 bike. Are you saying you have achieved this for much less?

Yes; £150 for a £1500 bike subject to approval.

Now there's the clincher: let us know when you have the carnet in hand.:thumbup1:

Me too
 

Id like to see that ... I'm quoted 3000 for a £4500 bike

Just a quick update on my application.

Barclays Bank called yesterday requesting additional information on my financial position; assets, liabilities, incoming / outgoing funds etc.

Anyway they called again today to say my application has been approved!

They're sending out forms to complete and they will then forward the insurance indemnity to the RAC!

£50 admin plus 1.5% per annum [£150 minimum] = £200 total!

Useful to know, thanks for providing the update.

How much markup by the RAC to issue the CdP?
i.e. Look forward to hearing about the final bill.

I did the bank guarantee with my own bank/mortgage lender (Virgin One) which is an offset mortgage account. While the fee was as low as the OP, what I didn't anticipate was the amount I could draw down from my mortgage (ie what I was travelling on) was reduced by the full carnet amount. So in the end I had less ££s to travel on and would have preferred to have done it the insurance way, buy hey ho, it was all done in a bit of a rush by phone to UK from Australia.

Haggis are you talking about the same thing here ie a fee to arrange a bank guarantee? This is just a document processing/admin charge like you'd pay to arrange a mortgage.

The amount of the guarantee will also be largely irrelevant to this charge.

Our bank guarantee was for nearly 30K (we had a car and were going via Egypt so the cover had to be for 8x the value of the car). The fee for the guarantee was 50GBP per quarter.

From memory the RAC charge around 150GBP to issue the document (I think the price depends on no. of pages requested).

confused a bit
 

I was intending to arrange via RAC UK. Total cost for insurance + fees is around £3000. I could arrange bank guarantees etc but as I live in Australia and using UK bike, may be difficult at both ends.

The guarantee for India is 500% so £4500 value bike needs guarantee of £22,500. Indemnity method costs 10% of that with 5% returned when bike lands back safely. So far cost is £2250 + all the fees RAC charge, approx £2950.

Excuse me if Im being a bit thick here but is there a way I can reduce this?

No you're not being thick it's just that doing it via the insurance option is much more expensive. You're paying someone else to cover the risk. You'll get 1K of your 3K back on your return so your real cost is around 2K as opposed to probably 500 in total fees (RAC and bank) if you can get a guarantee. If you have any savings/assets you could use as security you may want to talk to your bank in Australia about providing the guarantee. There's no reason the bank needs to be a UK one.

Not to be facetious but how about buy a cheaper bike?

My bike was very cheap [£1500] for this specific reason.

Not just a cheap bike, but how are you getting the value of £4500? Is that the very bottom of the trade book price? You should value as if its come back from its trip with 20k+ of extra miles on the clock, and looking like a dog :-)