I understand returned payment fees for checks, but I’ve never been charged for having a credit card decline.
Stupid of me to sign up for auto-payment when I use my credit card for gas, I guess.
I understand returned payment fees for checks, but I’ve never been charged for having a credit card decline.
Stupid of me to sign up for auto-payment when I use my credit card for gas, I guess.
When I was doing Amazon Turk - had like $10 to my name, I accidentally clicked on “withdraw funds” instead of “deposit funds” for the $15 I’d spent ten hours earning.
Bank of America charged me $35 for the “overdraft.”
Here’s my “Fuck BofA” story. A long time ago now, I was really tight on cash on a Friday and needed a few things before my next paycheck on Wednesday. I knew how much money I had in my account, and knew what I could afford, and what I couldn’t afford. I couldn’t afford the gas for my car if I bought my groceries and paid a few other bills, which meant that I would just overdraft the card for the gas. I’d be about $10 short of filling up the tank, so I was okay with paying the $35 overdraft fee for the gas, because I needed it to get to work. I did the math, and I’d be roughly -$50 when it was all said and done.
Come Monday, I find that I’m at -$500. I look at my account history, and I see that BofA reorganized all my transactions from the weekend, processing them from largest to smallest. So instead of ONE large purchase overdrafting my account and accruing a single overdraft fee, they hit me with like 6 overdraft fees because of all of the smaller, ~$5 purchases I had made that weekend.
I fought with them for months, telling them that I’d pay the single overdraft fee if they agree to charge me based on the timeline in which I actually made the purchases, but they refused to budge, and eventually closed down the account, and also blacklisted me from opening an account with any major bank again.
The next year, a law was passed that made it so they can’t do that anymore. But the law didn’t make them pay back anybody that they already fucked over.
A lot of banks like to do that biggest to smallest it seems. The one I asked about it gave an excuse of 'the bigger payments are probably things like rent or car payments and we wouldn’t want THOSE to bounce since there was some hard cutoff to the amount they let you overdraw. Nonsense of course, but that was the line given.
I knew exactly what your story was going to be about by the end of the first sentence. It’s so common that it’s immediately predictable. Fuck BofA and their bullshit.
We too were victims of the BoA shuffle which maximized what fee they’d hit us with. Was one of many reasons why we said goodbye and joined a credit union.
Disabling overdraft is the first thing people should do when opening a bank account. It’s extremely predatory.
Wells Fargo made a lot of money on ‘Sort Order Optimization’
Say you have $100 in your bank account. You buy a candy bar for $2 from a vending machine, a coke for another $2, fill up $20 worth of gas, and then spend $100 on groceries. You’d think one overdraft charge, for the groceries, right?
Nope. The groceries will be taken out first, then the gas, then the candy bar and coke. Three overdraft charges.
It’s expensive being poor - and they knew that:
That is so fucked up
And is now illegal, thankfully.
I hope you are with a local or regional credit union now.
Yep! I actually closed my account pretty much immediately afterwards, and went with a local credit union which has been consistently great! They gave me a really good rate when I needed a car loan, have floated me if I was a little short before my direct deposit came in…
Glad to hear it. This is one of the best “small things” you can help people with, in my opinion. BofA is so predatory. I switched to a credit union here in Seattle from them years ago. It was literally the first time I actually earned money in savings rather than it be melted away by fees.
I switched from chase to becu a while back and the difference is staggering. I should have done it way earlier
I use BECU as well. I am in Seattle. Chase is the devil. I never forgive them for causing Easy Street to close in LQA.