(Sorry to Go All Kanye There, but It’s True)
By Anna Minard
Earlier this year, Chase converted my grandfathered WaMu free checking account into one with monthly charges. I didn’t know this, and I used my last 10 bucks to buy food. The next day, my account was overdrawn. The easy thing about not having much money is that I can do the math in my head, and I knew I hadn’t spent more than $10. But there on the screen was a $10 fee, followed by two tiny purchases, each with their own $34 overdraft fee.
On my lunch break, I went and met with a young-looking Chase banker, explaining to him that they’d taken my $10 without alerting me in any way, it had caused me to overdraw my account, and I would like the charges refunded. He asked me if I had direct deposit. I did. He asked me if I had at least one direct deposit of $500 or more every month. No, I told him. I worked part time, and my paychecks varied depending on how many hours I got. He said I now needed a $500-or-higher direct deposit each month to avoid fees, even if my monthly deposits exceeded that. I told him that wasn’t possible for me. He looked concerned, then said: “Have you thought about trying to get more hours at work, or more work?”
I took a full speechless second to process that. I was working as many hours as I could get each week. I blushed with shame and rage. “Um, thank you, but don’t tell me to make more money so you won’t steal from me.” He gave me a customer-service frown and said something boring I don’t remember. “Look,” I said. “It already sucks to be poor, okay? I’m not making this little money on purpose. You’re charging me for not having enough money.” No reaction. “I might as well keep my money under a mattress! A mattress wouldn’t take $10 out of itself every month.” That’s true, he said. Did I have any accounts at other banks? They’d hate to lose me as a customer, but maybe I could use other bank accounts for now. I said I’d be closing my account when I got paid again, and left.
On the advice of a friend, I went to the branch where I’d originally set up my account to see if they’d be more understanding. The banker there said new laws were costing Chase, and unfortunately they just had to pass that along. “I can read a newspaper,” I told him. “Y’all are doing just fine.” He smiled tightly. I said I knew he was just doing his job and I walked out.
Now I bank with a credit union.
You Already
The Credit Union Set
a Record for New
Accounts Last Month
by Christopher Frizzelle
BECU, short for Boeing Employees Credit Union, started during the other Great Depression, in 1935. Back then, Boeing required its factory workers to buy their own tools, but banks were not lending money to the kind of people who were working at Boeing’s factories. So 18 of those workers banded together, each pitched in 50 cents for a total of $9 in assets, and started a credit union. “Seventy-five years later, we’re almost $9.6 billion in assets,” says spokesman Todd Pietzsch.
You don’t have to be a Boeing employee to be a member of BECU, just a Washington State resident. “Credit unions are not-for-profit member-owned co-ops, meaning that every member has one equal share. Revenue that comes in goes back to the consumer. There is no stockholder in the equation. The stockholders are the members,” Pietzsch explains. “Because we don’t have Wall Street to answer to, all our decisions are made by what’s in the best interest of the membership.” Pietzsch says that since Bank of America announced a new surcharge for using debit cards, the rate of new memberships has more than doubled. “In the month of September, we hit a record of 9,400 new members—just in that month.” Again, that’s just Washington State. “We’re staying open late if we need to because we don’t want to push anyone away.”
Walking to Chase last week to close my checking and savings accounts was the best trip to Chase I’ve had in years. This is a bank that’s probably made $2,000 in overdraft fees from me over the last 12 years, and all I have to show for it is remarkably shitty customer service. Once, when trying to explain to a manager that I had a bunch of overdraft fees because a car rental company was taking nearly a month to refund a deposit, he exclaimed that I was breaking the law by spending more money than I had, that I had committed “a felony,” and that he should be mad at me. Another time, a Chase employee talked me into a Chase credit card, hilariously called the Freedom card, to cover any overdrafts I might accidentally have, and I said I would sign up if he could get me an interest rate in the low teens, and he said he could do that, but at the end of the transaction he said he “forgot” to look what the interest rate would be and that he couldn’t “go back to the previous screen” so I had to wait and see what the rate was when I got the card in the mail. It was 24 percent.
The Chase employee who closed my accounts was the nicest man I’ve ever encountered at Chase. He’d just transferred from another branch, and when I muttered that maybe he could help the branch revamp its customer service, he muttered that that was part of the reason for his transfer. He very valiantly tried to get me to change my mind, but wasted no time in getting me a cashier’s check and calling the credit card division to cancel my Freedom. Then, lighter than air, I walked down the street to BECU, where the employee who opened my account admitted, “It’s been pretty crazy the last few days. We’ve been just slammed with new accounts.”
Pointing at my Chase debit card and Chase Freedom card, I said, “I can’t wait to cut these up,” and the employee responded, “We’re getting a lot of people saying that.”
Bank of America
Because You’re Rapacious, Uncaring, and Sloppy
By Bethany Jean Clement
When Bank of America ate my original bank, Seafirst, I went to Washington Mutual in protest. When Washington Mutual started circling the drain in 2008, I joined Bank of America. While I was closing my WaMu account, the assistant manager of the Broadway branch told me that the media was acting irresponsibly and reporting things that were “just untrue,” and that word of mouth was causing people to make “emotional decisions,” and that I was being “rash.”
Not long ago, the assistant manager at the Bank of America on Madison told me I might be liable for several thousand dollars’ worth of fraudulent charges on my debit card. Some of them were more than 30 days old, he said, so it might be too late. “Might?!” I said. My eye started to twitch. He kept calling me “ma’am.” “You don’t have to call me ‘ma’am,'” I’d already told him. He explained that he’d gone to military school, which seemed somewhat irrelevant.
The assistant manager made me sit for more than an hour with a knot in my stomach about the several thousand dollars, then put me on the phone with the fraud department, who immediately said they had a zero-liability policy for fraudulent charges, no matter how old they were. When I suggested to the assistant manager that he familiarize himself with his own bank’s policies in order to not cause people like me undue stress, he gazed at me in a bovine way and was as smoothly evasive as someone wrong can be.
This was the second time my Bank of America debit card got fraudulated in the space of a few months. Now B of A plans to introduce a $5 monthly debit-card fee. I don’t even use my debit card; will I get to pay the fee when someone else does?
B of A played what’s been called a starring role in the foreclosure crisis; B of A got tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer-financed bailout money. Last year, B of A almost took a little old lady’s house away because of a mistake, which led the New York Times to call it part of “a system that is… rapacious, uncaring—and sloppy.” B of A, I am coming to get my money—once you get it all back to me. I am taking it to a credit union. If your assistant manager calls me “ma’am” one more time, fine. If he calls me “rash,” I am not quite sure what I might do.
You Sooner, Chase…
Considering What You
Did to My Country
By Goldy
Unlike a lot of my whiny coworkers, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed doing business with Chase, our nation’s second-largest bank. I’ve found the service more than adequate, the fees and rates perfectly reasonable, and the convenience—well, that’s where big banks like Chase really kick ass: neighborhood branches throughout the city, no-fee ATMs around nearly every corner (more than 16,000 nationwide!), and online transfers and bill-pay that have completely transformed the way I bank. Hell, I can even deposit a check by snapping a photo of it with my iPhone. How cool is that?
In fact, I’d say that I have absolutely no complaints at all about banking with Chase, other than, you know, the way it has fucked my country.
Few banks were more complicit in, or profited more from, the financial collapse than JPMorgan Chase, a leading player in the real-estate-bubble-inflating subprime mortgage market and the main banker to imprisoned Ponzi-schemer Bernie Madoff. Earlier this year, Chase agreed to pay $153.6 million to settle US Securities and Exchange Commission fraud charges, just days before the trustee representing Madoff’s victims filed claims seeking $19 billion in damages. “JPMorgan Chase chose to enable Madoff’s fraud,” the trustee charged in a 155-page complaint, “not just through the various ways it participated in its activity, but by helping to cover Madoff’s naked theft with the imprimatur of a globally recognized financial institution.”
More recently, Chase was fined $88 million by the US Treasury in September for illegal wire transfers to Cuba and another $47 million by UK regulators in June. But of course those numbers are chump change compared to the $25 billion taxpayer-funded bailout Chase received in 2008—the largest bailout amount awarded—money that CEO Jamie Dimon admitted at the time he intended to use to be “a little bit more active on the acquisition side or opportunistic side,” rather than for making the kinds of new loans necessary to help jump-start our economy. And that was after Chase had already scooped up troubled financial giants Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual at bargain-basement postcrash prices.
It was “WaMu,” of course, that brought my accounts to Chase when the once high-flying, Seattle-based banking juggernaut collapsed in the largest bank failure in US history, allowing Chase to snatch its retail banking business for pennies on the dollar. According to a 2010 US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations report, WaMu executives knowingly created a “mortgage time bomb” by making subprime loans they knew would likely go bad and then fraudulently packaging them into risky securities. “Washington Mutual built a conveyor belt that dumped toxic mortgage assets into the financial system like a polluter dumping poison into a river,” said Senator Carl Levin, the subcommittee chair.
And it wasn’t just investors who WaMu brought low. WaMu exploited the Federal Reserve’s post-9/11 cheap-money policy to transform itself into a predatory lending pioneer, aggressively marketing teaser rates and fanciful “option ARM” loans to low- and middle-income borrowers who could barely afford the less-than-interest-
only minimum payments, let alone the balloon payments that inevitably followed. As a result, tens of thousands of families ultimately lost their homes to short sales and foreclosure, even as WaMu executives raked in record bonuses.
Thus, in a very real sense, the banking convenience I’ve long enjoyed has been subsidized by the suffering and exploitation of others, which I suppose makes me just as complicit in WaMu/Chase’s abuses as those who casually do business with Mexican drug cartels are in that particular reign of terror. And yet every time I intended to close my accounts and put my money where my liberal mouth is, inertia (i.e., laziness) somehow always got in the way.
Until last weekend, when inspired and shamed by the Occupy movements on Wall Street and in Seattle, I spent a mere five fucking minutes filling out an online application form and finally opened an account at member-owned, not-for-profit, guilt-free BECU. It even transferred my opening balance directly out of my old Chase account. It was like magic. And, it turns out, nearly as convenient as the faceless giant I’m leaving, offering the same online banking services to which I’ve grown accustomed, plus a network of 28,000 surcharge-free ATMs nationwide, including deposit-taking ATMs at the many 7-Elevens scattered throughout Seattle.
I pass two 7-Elevens twice a day commuting to and from work. Oh thank heaven. What could be more convenient than that?
So fuck you, Chase, and good riddance. I’m keeping what little money I have here in my community, where it can be put to work on behalf of my neighbors, instead of ripping them off. 
Hopefully I won’t hear about my new credit union screwing people out of their home and demanding a handout for it. Wells Fargo congratulates me for being “a 15-year Wells Fargo customer” (thanks to multiple takeovers)… This is like complimenting Patti Hearst on being such a good little soldier.
Like Patti Hearst, I now feel like doing in the banks.
GenX may have finally gotten a “real” job with a suit, but they’re gonna wish we’d have settled for drumming in the park – we’re opting out, and taking our hard-earned dough with us.
@ Paul
“Where were you?”
Touting the benefits of local credit unions with a mouth full of free dum-dums from SECU well before the Depression began. Looks like you’ve mentioned this too, but I’m just a tad disappointed it took a $5 debit card fee and not the destruction of our entire economy to get a feature length instructional on changing banks. Better late than never, though!
I’ve been banking with BECU for years and it’s been great. I think one more thing to mention about BECU locations for those who may be concerned that they are limited, which they are, in comparison to the big banks, is that they do “shared banking” with other credit unions so you can make deposits, use ATM’s, etc., free of charge.
Mark my words- Banks won’t take this lying down. They are going to try their damnedest to cripple Credit Unions through legislation if this momentum holds up… So it’s our jobs to be vigilante and nip any pro-bank legislation in the bud.
Put your money with a Viking! Viking Bank is the most amazing bank on the planet, they make me feel like it isn’t even a bank. I have never had a single fee on my account-ever. I have no problem with Credit Unions, but I love the small community bank. They know my name when I walk in, call me if my balance is getting low to make a deposit (BEFORE) i overdraw my account, helped us with our home loan (great rate). Hope you all can find a bank like mine!
@50 I managed a transfer from my New Zealand bank account to my BECU checking without any problems.
@50 small community bank all the way! (see my post @61) 🙂
#59 –
As I was reading all these posts about how great Credit Unions are, I had the same concern as you expressed.
People need to start taking responsibility not only for their own lives and money, but also for society as a whole. As long as people sit back and let other people handle it, they have to expect to get screwed. So I hope your warning is heard, and that people do pay attention to pending legislation in this area.
The big banks absolutely are notorious, but they always have been. I remember decades ago leaving B of A because it was clearly corporate fascism of the worst sort. I guess the Stranger audience is mostly people just learning about grown-up things?
We are supposed to keep track of our own money. The only purpose of the bank statement is to make sure that no unauthorized transactions have taken place. Don’t rely upon the bank to tell you how much money you have.
Live within your income. Don’t use credit cards if you have bad credit. that’s the point. If you can’t afford to pay cash, you can’t afford it. Don’t eat in restaurants. Don’t buy booze or cigarettes. Don’t buy new clothes, only second-hand. Barter for your rent. Learn to fix computers or repair houses.
Eventually you will be able to take advantage of those great Chase offers, where they pay you $200 to open an account, and keep it open for 90 days (now, six months) and then close it and say, “Thanks for the money, guys!”
Or accept those credit card offers where they give you 50,000 points, enough for a free trip to Hawaii. Take the card, pay your phone bill by credit card for one month, close the account and say, “Thanks for the trip to Hawaii!”
But first you have to be a saver, not a spender.
I refinanced my condo through BECU in 2009, and not only got a great rate, but the total cost for eveything was only $1600, and it took a week. Other places were taking months, and charging $5-$10K, and many were not refinancing at all!
But the main thing is to take control of your own money and spending.
#59 –
As I was reading all these posts about how great Credit Unions are, I had the same concern as you expressed.
People need to start taking responsibility not only for their own lives and money, but also for society as a whole. As long as people sit back and let other people handle it, they have to expect to get screwed. So I hope your warning is heard, and that people do pay attention to pending legislation in this area.
The big banks absolutely are notorious, but they always have been. I remember decades ago leaving B of A because it was clearly corporate fascism of the worst sort. I guess the Stranger audience is mostly people just learning about grown-up things?
We are supposed to keep track of our own money. The only purpose of the bank statement is to make sure that no unauthorized transactions have taken place. Don’t rely upon the bank to tell you how much money you have.
Live within your income. Don’t use credit cards if you have bad credit. that’s the point. If you can’t afford to pay cash, you can’t afford it. Don’t eat in restaurants. Don’t buy booze or cigarettes. Don’t buy new clothes, only second-hand. Barter for your rent. Learn to fix computers or repair houses.
Eventually you will be able to take advantage of those great Chase offers, where they pay you $200 to open an account, and keep it open for 90 days (now, six months) and then close it and say, “Thanks for the money, guys!”
Or accept those credit card offers where they give you 50,000 points, enough for a free trip to Hawaii. Take the card, pay your phone bill by credit card for one month, close the account and say, “Thanks for the trip to Hawaii!”
But first you have to be a saver, not a spender.
I refinanced my condo through BECU in 2009, and not only got a great rate, but the total cost for eveything was only $1600, and it took a week. Other places were taking months, and charging $5-$10K, and many were not refinancing at all!
But the main thing is to take control of your own money and spending.
Twinstar credit union is where it’s at, my friends.
How does 2.5% interest on your checking account sound?
Stay with me here- you’ll need to do 12 debit card transactions per month (no fees!) and have direct deposit set up, but that’s it.
And you can set up the account online without driving to their closest branch, which is in Renton. http://www.twinstarcu.com
You’re welcome.
The answer is to break up these fucking “too big to fail” corporate trolls like Bank of America. Break up all the obese multinational corporate banks around the world. Whatever happened to local banks like Peoples Bank? They all got ate up by these faceless, greed driven, to big to fail assholes.
But what can you do when the Supreme Court rules that corporations have the same rights as individuals? Boycott the big banks.
@68: Right on!! I’m already doing that.
Here’s an interesting thought: since the U.S. dollar is doing nothing but going down in flames because of corporate greed, $1 billion times zero = zero. Soon the “richest 1% of Americans” will join the rest of us! And it will be their own damn faults.
Wells Fargo called me last night and tried to explain that they wouldn’t have to charge me $3 a month for debit card fees if I would just go ahead and put $25,000 into my checking account. Or get a new credit card from them and use my debit purchases on it. When I explained they were holding plenty of money from me already, they said, “Well, it’s only three dollars! Why are you complaining?” This person wasn’t trying to be mean, and probably didn’t mean to sound that stupid. She’s just part of something that needs to be taken apart immediately, completely.
Surprised nobody mentioned Verity Credit Union. There’s lots of great benefits to banking with them, including a free coin machine—directly deposits your piggy bank into your checking account. High interest rates on your checking account. $25 in ATM refunds each month (use any ATM you want! That ATM fee will get refunded at the end of the month!), worldwide. Only 1% exchange fee on purchases in Canada (Wells Fargo charges 3%). Free checks. They deposit $25 for each direct deposit account you set up. You even get $25 when a friend says they heard about Verity through you.
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia-p…
Typical Fat lazy Americans who need to wait for violence before they acknowledge the world is sick of the lack of human evolution? …..ya think?
lets switch to a Chase Bank commercial that will advertise its In the toilet ATM convenience commodes. Just deposit and flush!
I have a small business account at BECU and one at SMCU. You can do an international wire transfer. I’ve done it. It gets routes through Wells Fargo at no charge to my business then directly into my BECU account. Works perfectly. Small businesses should switch to a credit union.
My two cents:
I was with Wells Fucko for way too long. A couple years ago, I had some $1-$3 transactions and a cash deposit on a sunday, but they magically decided that the time I deposited the money was AFTER I’d made the debits to my account, and there went $350 (about half my monthly income at the time) into overdraft fees. They only reversed a couple of them and I got stuck with footing the bill on their mistake. I should’ve switched banks immediately, but I had that whole “inertia”/laziness thing too, until about this time last year.
I had just moved into a new place and all my money was completely gone, but I had a recurring automatic charge for my internet bill. I’d set up my debit account so it would reject any charges that would overdraw my account, so when my bill tried to be deducted, it would reject and I’d just pay it three days later when I got paid. Plan worked, everything’s fine, no fees, etc. Everything is fine.
Then the next month, same thing; I’m still recovering from moving expenses and my account isn’t going to have the money to pay my bill for a day or two… but somehow the bank decided to let the charge go through AND charge me an overdraft fee. So I called them and yelled a lot, and they said “Oh well we have this new rule that if it’s a recurring charge, we let it go through anyway. Last month was just a courtesy blah blah whatever bullshit.” BUT YOU DIDN’T TELL ME THAT. SO WHY IS IT DIFFERENT NOW. The guy only refunds me HALF of the overdraft fee so I ask for his manager and eventually get the other half back too. I tell them thanks, I didn’t want to have to go through the trouble of switching banks, etc…. but I closed my account the next day and switched to BECU. I’ve made more in interest since I switched ten months ago than I did the entire six years I was with stupid Wells Fargo. Fuuuuuuck those guys!
Amazing, so many comments – this is really a hot topic. For my side, I has some bad experience too, but that I would attribute mostly to not beeing cautious.
Sounds like none of the Stranger contributors had any basic money sense or read the fine print in the bank agreements.
I agree that the student loan system is a scam – and 20 years ago I felt the same way about it. That’s why I did not go to college.
I don’t pay any bank fees because I maintain high balances. I’m self-employed.
Quit your whining and take hold of the economy yourselves. If you still expect the answers to come from something up above, you will always remain below.
Sounds like none of the Stranger contributors had any basic money or banking sense.
As a youth I mistrusted the student loan system and banks. I did not go to college and for many years I did not maintain a bank account.
A former Seattleite, I now reside in New York where as a self-employed person I maintain a Chase account with no fees. I don’t mistake the tellers or branch manager as the face of the enemy.
Stop acting like victims and take hold of your economy and world.
All the bank robbers that ever lived haven’t stolen a fraction of the money from banks that banks have stolen from people.
I had a passbook savings account as a kid where I diligently saved my earnings from lawn mowing and babysitting. I moved to another city to go to college, I got an account at a different bank, and a real job. Years later, visiting the folks, I found the forgotten passbook. The bank had changed hands, been bought up by a larger one. The bank manager glanced at my passbook and stated that any account inactive for more than two years became the property of the bank. It was a recent rule they had made up and posted along with a lot of others right next to the front door I hadn’t passed through in years.
It wasn’t a lot of money. Less than I make in a good month now. It just seemed like a bank had stolen all those afternoons and weekends of my childhood when I should have been riding my bike or swimming or playing baseball.
I really wish #38/#49 would tell us how her student loans got tripled. As soon as I asked, she mysteriously disappeared. Did the banks assassinate her, or did the cat get her tongue?
Goldy had the only good reason to leave. This opinion piece would have been great if accompanied with an investigative report on interchange rates, what they are, why they changed and how this was the reason that banks started to implement “fees” for checking accounts. The unforeseen consequences of this legislation have yet to come out of the woodwork, my guess is money will become even more expensive for those who need it most. Once again some sort of reporting on this would make for a much more interesting conversation, but would take some investigation. By the way I am a conservative who has always used Credit Unions because it makes sense for me, not because it made me feel good inside. Look my comment took the same amount of effort as a lead story in the stranger.
I have always been with BECU. For twelve years I’ve been with BECU. You know how many times I’ve been charged an overdraft fee? Once. You know how many times I’ve incurred any kind of fee that I wasn’t sure I deserved? Zero. You know how many times I’ve been dissatisfied with customer service? Zero.
When I was in Spain a few years ago (and this was my first time travelling internationally) and I forgot to tell them I’d be going (because I was an idiot and didn’t know to) and they shut off my account (because we had an emergency and they saw a $400 charge from somewhere in Barcelona), I called, they told me next time I needed to go ahead and let them know I’d be out of country, and instead of putting me on hold while they fixed it, the woman stayed on the line and ASKED ME ABOUT MY TRIP. She talked to me for fifteen minutes while her fraud department was fixing my mistake about tapas and Gaudi, and when I was done telling her about how amazing the Alhambra was (because she didn’t want to interrupt my talky ass), she said “Alright, Lauren. Everything is a go. Thank you for your patience with us, and I’m glad you called. Have fun in Spain, and take some pictures of Granada for me!”
Just one of hundreds of shining examples I personally have of the outstanding customer service I’ve encountered with credit unions. They don’t spend all day fucking over their customers, so their customers are happy, and when we’re happy, they’re happy, and when they’re happy, we’re happy times a million. There is no. logical. explanation. for. banking. with. a. bank.
@76
Thank you, at least one person with some sort of common sense.
The comments in this thread are a testament to why certain predatory industries are successful…Because you people are fucking idiots. You can, wait for it, CHOOSE where to put your money. No one is requiring you to have a relationship with a bank large, small, or otherwise.
And to the person just figuring out that your SSN is tied to your credit report which drives your credit rating. Are you fucking 12 years old? Did no one explain how the world works?
Think about it for one moment if you were someone lending money or credit (which is why we have credit reports).
“Hi, I’d like some money”
“Are you going to pay me back?”
“Yes!”
“But you haven’t paid anyone back you’ve ever borrowed money from…”
“Oh, that, wait, let me get out my list of excuses…”
Please try to grow up and take some personal responsibility. If you don’t want to pay the fees or you can’t maintain a minimum balance to have them waived then cease your relationship with that business. No one is holding a gun to your head (and spare me the societal pressures and only being able to “exist” within the system designed to make you fail…).
I like BofA …. I like the features I don’t pay anything for, adding a small fee every month is … meh. Seriously people, if you don’t want to pay the fee switch or STFU already, okay? It’s not rocket science. If banks weren’t treating people right, they’d have no accounts.
Five bucks a month … still better than 44 cents each purchase with debit, and someone has to pay the major credit organizations run by the government for using “their” system.
@83: Whatever floats your boat.
@76 & @82: I agree!!
Okay, just want to add, after seeing the new online banking system, it’s so worth paying an extra $5 a month for using debit. FYI, they were actually doing real updates to their system, it wasn’t some “attack” or anything lame like that. There was a massive complete system upgrade, integrating everything basically, real time banking, finally.
BECU accounts are up 200% this month and ;ool like they will be up 300% next month per FOX news?
Seems like yer yank banks are going to go under and “again” expect a hand out as they seem more like crack heads then bankers?
Fasten your seat belts and extinguish all smokes and place your pillow on your lap and put your head between your legs if this info is even half true as its about like this cargo ship if so?
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,154…
New Zealand’s environment minister has called this the greatest catastrophe in the country’s history.
I’ve been using a credit union for about forever, and also think they’re great. (Mine has been giving me back .5% of my loan balances every year; I like that they make my mortgage payment for me once a year.) I opened a BoA checking account about a year ago when they gave me about $220 over 6 months to do so. I don’t have a debt card with them (I keep a credit card without a balance with them, and enjoy the cash back and extra month to pay instead.)
That said, money isn’t THAT hard to deal with. If your account is so low all the time that you MIGHT be overdrafting without notice, try spending less money on things you can live without (skip the bar for a few week, bring your lunch) and save up a cushion so that won’t happen. An extra $100 in the bank means those lunches out won’t overdraft you. Stop spending more than you make, and everything will work out fine.
To the people complaining about credit reports: all money things are tied to you. That’s how it should be. I don’t want to have to pay higher interest rates because you default on a bunch of loans. Again, stop spending more than you make, and everything will work out fine.
I overheard an exasperated mother cussing out her ‘activist’ college student daughter today on the bus. it was hilarious.
“YOU CANT JUST SWITCH BANKS LIKE THAT! Do you know how many accounts and deposits and automatic things I have set up? Do you think this stuff just magically appears? How do you expect the money to get transferred from your fund now? None of that is set up with the credit union. There are payments pending! God Dammit I wish you would think about these things before you just DO them. Our accountant is-LISTEN TO ME! our accountant is pissed off, sherry. What is wrong with you?”
I laughed my goddamned ass off.
@89 The smart thing to do is just to open an account first, and then switch things over throughout the month so you don’t miss any automatic payments.
I haven’t seen anyone make that point here yet, but it’s a good one.
@90 Exactly. Don’t get me wrong- it FEELS great to dramatically storm in and close your account all at once, but the smart thing to do is slowly transfer everything over the course of a few weeks to a month. (Unless you’re like me and had the good fortune to not set up any automatic bill payments or direct deposits with the bank).
I do think Chase is evil, always have — ($34 for an overdraft fee!? BofA is $10).
But Bank of America has been really good to me. It sounds like the writer who complained about B of A is actually saying that THOUSANDS were taken from their account, and they waited over 30 days to report it. What’s wrong with you? Do you not check your balance? That’s YOUR fault, honey. And then what happened? You went into the branch, got on the phone (aww, I’m so sorry you had to wait an hour) and the bank gave you your money back. I’ve had my debit card physically stolen, and when I reported it right away, I got not only the charges they made covered, but a few of my own. 🙂 They’ve been great – $5 debit card fee, oh well.
The B of A customer is irresponsible. In fact, even the poor girl: irresponsible. Why would you spend the last $10 you have in your account? That’s just stupid. Go to your parent’s house and get some cereal.
Breaking news: people who are bad at money (everyone but the Jew) get fined by their financial institutions and come to hate them.
How do you think BECU is going to pay for the physical and personal infrastructure needed to handle 10k new accounts in 1 month? I’ll give you exactly 1 guess.
“This is a bank that’s probably made $2,000 in overdraft fees from me over the last 12 years, and all I have to show for it is remarkably shitty customer service.”
At $20 a pop for overdraft fees, this would average out to about 8 overdrafts a year over the 12 years. Maybe greedy out-of-state banks are only part of the problem here? I’ve met many otherwise intelligent people with no financial sense at all.
I’ve paid fees for overdrafting my debit card and it sucks. But then again, the bank is basically spotting me the cash to cover my purchase, no matter if I have good credit or bad. It’s like getting a mini payday loan. If I want to borrow money from the bank at a decent interest rate and avoid fees, I’d apply for a credit card and use that for purchases, paying it off each month.
As for switching from B of A to a credit union, that was so, like, 1997. Way to get on the bandwagon now. Of course, the readers that only had a piggy bank in 1995 have an excuse. 🙂
@38 have you tried Express Credit Union? Their mission is to serve people w/ money troubles, as an alternative to predatory lenders. http://expresscu.org/
“As through this world you travel, you’ll meet some funny men/ Some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen.”
-Woody Guthrie “Pretty Boy Floyd” 1939
“As through this world you travel, you’ll meet some funny men
Some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen.”
– Woody Guthrie “Pretty Boy Floyd” 1939
I hope they’re geared up for Nov 5.
I just switched to BECU after 15+ years with Wells Fargo. As if WF’s whinging about Durbin while announcing record quarterly profits weren’t bad enough, its claim that the new fees are only (and inadequately) make up for capped interchange fees is just hooey:
WF’s projected yearly “loss” from Durbin: $813MM[1]
# WF debit-cart accts: ~40 million[2]
WF card-fee revenue (40MM * $3 * 12): $1.44Bn/yr[3]
——————————————–
WF PROFIT from Durbin: $587MM/year
It seems Wells Fargo will actually profit by $.5 billion/year from of the new card fees. They’re using the letter of a “consumer friendly” law to defy the spirit of the law. And then they’re just blatantly lying–actually, saying the opposite of the truth–about how that profit is a loss. How can I do business with a bank that embraces such an ethos?
Also, I’m just sick of WF and the whole big-bank obscenity. WF was jut fined $85 million for pushing subprime mortgages that, in the aughts, made the bank billions and later netted it another $36 billion in bailout funds[4].). So…when big banks pursue abusive practices, they profit And when the government attempts to correct for these abuses, banks profit. It just sucks.
Sources:
1. http://www.mybanktracker.com/bank-news/2…
2. http://www.digitaltransactions.net/news/…
3. Currently, WF’s fees are being test-marketed in five states. Test marketing indicates the strategy is optional. If it goes well, they’ll roll out fees nationwide. If not, there are other options. WF is _choosing_ to offload fees onto all customers, disproportionate to account balances.
4. http://www.seiu.org/a/profilewells.php
“A very great man once said, that some people rob you with a fountain pen.
Didn’t take too long to find out just what he was talking about.
Yeah… Lotta people don’t have much food on the table… but they got a lotta forks… and knives…
And they gotta cut something.”
Just quoting Dylan. Banks oughta be happy that Americans hold up signs to get their attention.
Are the banks smart enough for you to trust them? Hey, Wells Fargo customers, they fucked up your statements too, didn’t they?
I am seriously wondering if people know where the money for technology upgrades and improved services come from at this point.
For those who are with BofA, you know what I’m talking about, serious crackdown on card fraud (protecting the account holder), upgrades to their banking system and ATMs (making life easier for the account holder), and better training for customer service reps (friendlier people for the account holder) …. the tech upgrades in the last few years alone would cost a fortune, especially if the government was doing the upgrades ($200 for a computer mouse … sheesh). So yeah, most of us are happy with our bank of choice, they lured us with insanely great accounts (MyAccess FTW!) and protected our money when it was there, fees and such are our problems, we incur them. They tell us about all of them up front, we know what we’re getting into when we open the account. There is no excuse blaming them for fees like overdraft, you knew about them when you signed up unless you are illiterate or a complete retard.
My only question is What the fuck took you people so long to dump these fucking banks!?
@102: KittenKoder: You list some excellent reasons why I stopped doing business with big banks. Mainly, it was because of ridiculous added fees.
I ‘m not talking about overdraft charges, which I agree, are legitimate. I mean really stupid fees, like for actually conducting a banking transaction with a living, breathing teller!
p.s. I like your new icon!
@103 Crash: I’ve been big bank-less for 10 years now; hopefully I’ve learned not to make the same mistakes again, God forbid.
With regard to the student loans that tripled, that’s what happens when you default on them. The $35,000 that I borrowed through the Guaranteed Student Loan Program when I was in grad school jumped to a balance of over $100,000 after I became unemployed and was forced to stop paying back the loans. When I finally got a steady full-time job after a few years, the Department of Education garnished my wages; I figure I’ll have to work until I’m 130 years old or so to pay back everything!
@105 Evil Princess: OUCH! That should be illegal!
Financial institutions that do that should be closed down!
Seriously, how the fuck are today’s students, undergraduates earning BAs, master’s degree candidates, Ph.D’s, etc. getting through school anymore?
Holy crap, and my parents freaked out over $13,420.00 (although it seems like a drop in the bucket now) in student loans that I stupidly agreed to pay back, which included interest compounded DAILY—back in 1995!
Everybody read the fine print! If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
Since the third grade (1948) I had a WAMU account never a problem until Chase took over and drove me out I left $2.00 in my account maybe they could use it to pay those non union high school drop out Managers