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Very expensive mistake - Page 4

post #61 of 82
7/30/08 at 4:12pm
We have had something similar happen. Any deposit made after 3pm doesn't take affect until the next business day. We both work our of town so I called my mom in the morning to tell her where it was and see if she would deposit it for us, she does this every 2 weeks. Well she forgot to do it with her banking for work and did it at the end of the day, after 3. This was on a Friday and after running errands all day Saturday and Sunday... eek it was a mess. She felt terrible because once I realized the mistake I called to find out what time she deposited it.
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post #62 of 82
7/30/08 at 5:13pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by travlr View Post
I just read an article about this issue yesterday by one of my favorite financial collumnists Liz Pulliam Weston. She listed several banks that you CANNOT switch off the "courtesy" bounce protection. Another banking scam.
Good article. Looks like the Fed is considering disallowing this scam.

From the article:
Quote:
Complain to lawmakers and regulators. The Center for Responsible Lending has a form letter ( http://ga3.org/campaign/hr946 ) you can e-mail to your congressional representative, urging a vote for H.R. 946, the Consumer Overdraft Fair Practices Act. If you feel you've been victimized by bank bounce-fee policies, you can tell your story to the Federal Reserve using this form ( http://ga3.org/campaign/fedstopoverdraft ) or by e-mailing comments to regs.comments@federalreserve.gov . Be sure to include "Docket No. R-1314" in the subject line and act before Aug. 4, when the Fed's public-comment period ends.
post #63 of 82
7/30/08 at 6:21pm
Banks drive me absolutely nuts... with our direct deposit, it goes in on Friday, as in it shows it is in our account first thing Friday morning - and we can withdraw cash on Friday, but if any checks or card transactions come through Friday night they will bounce/charge nsf fees them b/c "technically" the money isn't there until Saturday - or that's the bs they told us.

Then recently dh's company was paying for our hotel and it was being billed directly. They asked for a card for "incidentals" and said nothing would be charged to it unless we ordered movies or room service or something. Yeah...they charged $600 to the card, only as a hold, but we didn't have that much in there, and then the bank proceeded to charge us $200 in nsf fees, and then when the hold came off, they still refused to remove the fees. I'm still fuming about that towards both the hotel and the bank...but we can't get them to do anything to reimburse us
post #64 of 82
7/30/08 at 6:45pm
Just as a heads-up, when you use a debit card to pay at the pump for gas, the system is set up whereby even if you only buy say $20 worth of gas, it approves a higher amount (around $50 or $75), and then somehow it sorts out how much you actually pumped, but the result is that you have a certain amount of money (more than you actually pumped) unavailable in your account for a certain amount of time. This can cause a person to be overdrawn because this is not disclosed. Maybe someone can fill in the details on this.
post #65 of 82
8/1/08 at 3:06pm
Thread Starter 

Update

The manager at my branch refunded the fees a few minutes ago. I had logged in before lunch and they weren't there, but now they are. I called them and the man I talked to the other day wasn't in, but I made sure to thank the person filling in for him. I am so relieved that we have our grocery money back :

I am going to be so extra careful from now on!
post #66 of 82
8/1/08 at 3:17pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by haitimom View Post
I have found that they are kinder and more likely to work with you if you go in in person. It is easy to say "No" when they don't have to say it to your face. I have found that if you go in they really do pull up your acct. info. and see that you don't do this regularly. They see it with their eyes that you made a mistake. I also noticed that when you call they don't look it up they just say no. Often we you call you are talking to a cashier. They aren't paid enough to think or use their brain. When you go in you most likely talk to someone higher up. Someone interested in keeping your business. Your business=their raise or promotion.

Well, as a former teller or "cashier" (with a degree and plenty of common sense and street smarts) I was paid well enough and had to use my brain quite often to explain banking procedures to uncomprehending customers. It's not that we didn't "use our brains", it's that we did not have the authority to reverse fees. Only the branch managers do. Furthermore, at least at several of the banks I worked at, each and every customer that called in w/ an overdraft had their acct looked up while on the phone to check their avg balance, how long they had the acct, if they made regular deposits, and how many times they had been overdrawn in the past year. So most banks are not going to say NO w/o looking at your banking relationship first. They would lose too much business that way.

To the OP, I would go over the branch mangers head and over customer service and ask for the district manager or regional manager. Ask them for the answers to tell you your average balance over the past year, how many times you've been overdrawn, and how long your account has been open. Point out again that this was an accident and have them explain their policy regarding when and how debits and credits post. Hope that helps!
post #67 of 82
8/1/08 at 3:18pm
Sorry, didn't see your update! Good for you!
post #68 of 82
8/1/08 at 8:01pm
Awesome!!
post #69 of 82
8/1/08 at 8:16pm
YAY! What a huge relief! :
post #70 of 82
8/2/08 at 2:27am
Yay!!!

We had a bunch of fees once because we looked at the balance from online banking at our CU and I had been keeping an on paper budget. We found out later that they were treating it like there were other pending transactions and saying that the online number isn't accurate and if they took out the overdraft fees we were overdrawn so they took them out. My dh went in and complained about it, they did refund. We had one other time that it happened and it was an online banking issue where they said the online amount was different from what they had in their computer (even though I had all the checks written and debits on paper and I couldn't find out where all the problems were)
post #71 of 82
8/2/08 at 3:19am
Yay for you! That's a wonderful update!
post #72 of 82
8/2/08 at 5:10pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by ~*Jaime View Post
Sorry to keep you ladies waiting for so long! DH and I had to drive in to PA for my doctor's appointment. Six hours in a car- we got home at 2 AM

The overdraft fees were my fault- I assumed that DH's direct deposit was available once it showed in the available balance- apparantly not- I guess only $100 of it is truly available to pay for items.
Jaime, it showed your balance as an "available balance"? Then why on earth wasn't it available? What does available mean to them? Those are some things I'd ask them! At every bank I've used in the past several years, available balance meant just that - the balance that was available to use. If I'd just made a check deposit that wasn't fully available, it might also have a second balance amount listed, but that wasn't called available.

And ditto to what everyone else said about direct deposit. That's one of the points of direct deposit; the funds are supposed to be available because they're transferred electronically.



And I have to ask, what bank is this that's giving you such awful service?


.
post #73 of 82
8/2/08 at 5:14pm
Jaime, I'm so glad to see your update! That must have been so frustrating. Good for you for taking it up to management level, although it stinks you had to even go that far to get some help to rectify an obviously innocent mistake.
post #74 of 82
8/3/08 at 3:15am
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by rainyday View Post
Jaime, it showed your balance as an "available balance"? Then why on earth wasn't it available? What does available mean to them? Those are some things I'd ask them! At every bank I've used in the past several years, available balance meant just that - the balance that was available to use. If I'd just made a check deposit that wasn't fully available, it might also have a second balance amount listed, but that wasn't called available.

And ditto to what everyone else said about direct deposit. That's one of the points of direct deposit; the funds are supposed to be available because they're transferred electronically.



And I have to ask, what bank is this that's giving you such awful service?


.
Yes, it showed up in my available balance and increased my available balance by the total amount of DH's paycheck. : It is BB&T.
post #75 of 82
8/3/08 at 5:45pm
If my account is low enough to have a possibility of overdraft if my deposit isn't cleared right away, I simply cash the check and then turn around and deposit the cash into my account. Cash clears instantly, at least I think it does, during business hours anyway....

Everybody's right here- it was technically her fault, but the bank has the power to waive the fees and they really ought to. I think it's important for the consumer to cover his/her ass though, knowing that banks are not people with souls and conscience, but corporations designed to make a profit.
post #76 of 82
8/6/08 at 5:04pm
I have had banks do this to me with money orders, cashiers' checks, and even cash. All deposited in person with the teller. It has nothing to do with "waiting for a check to clear" because it's all electronic these days anyway. Think about it for a minute: banks would be unable to function meaningfully if their records were really all out of sync like that. It's a legal fiction constructed for their convenience.

I have deposited cold hard cash with a teller (on a weekday) and gone to the grocery store the next day (also a weekday) and been humiliated unable to buy my groceries because my account was supposedly empty. Repeatedly, with at least three different banks. I became so distrustful of banks that for a couple of years I refused to use my debit card for purchases, even though my husband was making lots of money and depositing it all each week. I couldn't deal with the humiliation of having it look like I was poor trash, or trying to scam the store or something, when in fact I had plenty of money in the bank. I would pull cash out of an ATM and use that for a purchase. Now I am willing to use the card, but only if I check the balance online *immediately* before leaving the house.

Technically, no, it *wasn't* the OP's fault. Since when does "available" mean anything other than "available"? They are playing games.

People need to realize that the banks aren't doing anybody any favors. They take your money and lend it out at interest every day in the financial markets. If they let you spend it, they can't collect interest on it. But they also collect fees from merchants for the use of the debit card system. So if they keep your money from you, but let your debit card transaction go through, they make both the merchant fee and the interest on your money in their reserve. They're already ahead before the overdraft charges even come into the picture. And of course, the overdraft fees are far in excess of the cost to them of extending you the courtesy. Their real cost is probably a few cents.
post #77 of 82
8/6/08 at 5:29pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by GalateaDunkel View Post
I have had banks do this to me with money orders, cashiers' checks, and even cash. All deposited in person with the teller. It has nothing to do with "waiting for a check to clear" because it's all electronic these days anyway. Think about it for a minute: banks would be unable to function meaningfully if their records were really all out of sync like that. It's a legal fiction constructed for their convenience.
Coming from an insider, unfortunately, banks really are all "out of sync". Each bank has different processing times, different ways of processing, and not all banks (especially the small ones) are "electronic". One bank might process debits before credits and another bank might do it the opposite. If you have several items posting on a particular day one bank might deduct items from largest to smallest and another might deduct smallest to largest. And we do still have to wait for checks to clear. When you give a check to a teller, that teller is basically collecting all the paperwork that goes with your transaction and sending it once or twice a day to a central processing center where a real live person has to actually type in the info from the check. Since banks all close at different times, this could be any time of the night. It could happen at midnight or two am or five am. Obviously, everyone's transaction all can't possibly be processed at the same time. Then the actual paper check has to go to the bank - by car, plane, train, bus, whatever - that it came from so that they can verify that it is a good check. Checks can come back unpaid even months after they are cashed. Now, Check 21 which Bush put into effect in Oct of 2006 has helped speed up the process by turning checks into an electronic image, but you wouldn't believe the number of people that complained about that because you can't have your original check returned to you. I got out of banking for a reason, but if you could see the millions of dollars that banks return every year in overdraft fees you would be astounded.
post #78 of 82
8/6/08 at 5:31pm
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post #79 of 82
8/6/08 at 6:18pm
Man, that stinks.

Something similar happened to DP just last week - she had a scheduled pmt and her check was supposed to be deposited the day before. Except, the woman who collects the hourly pay sheets forgot to turn DP's in.

SO, her scheduled pmt cleared, but all of the other little debits she made (coffee and gum, a book, a few items from the grocery, etc) they all bounced! Every single item got a $35 charge - it's cost us over $400 in fees and penalties.

As soon as we have the money to cover it, I'm going in in person and telling them what the story is and ask if they can do anything at all to help with the fees. It's not like we have that kind of money lying around right now.

Anyhow Jaime, I'm sorry. Sucks big time. I hope you can get it worked out and get some kind of money back.
post #80 of 82
8/6/08 at 6:55pm
Awwwww, I am so sorry! It is ironic that I did the exact thing last week, too. Ran up 100+ in fees for one stupid mistake. In my case I didn't transfer the money between accounts online in time for the cutoff. I felt like throwing up the next morning when I saw the balance and the reason.

I am so sorry they didn't at least reduce the fees somewhat for you. That is messed up