Bank of America charges you five dollars every time you want to cash a paycheck. I could understand this if the check wasn’t drawn from Bank of America. Is it even legal for a bank to charge you to cash their own check? What if you refuse to pay the fee? Can they legally deny you the funds? “Service charge” my ass… how much could it possibly cost them to cash their own check? Other banks don’t seem to find the costs so exorbitant that they need to pass them onto the customer. All this basically boils down to plain ol’ greed, which brings me to my next point…
I work as a collector for a large debt collection agency (who shall remain nameless to protect my job, thank you very much :)). The client of ours that I work for is Bank of America, and I collect on overdrawn checking and safety deposit box accounts. I talk to people every day who have $5.00 overdrafts and $100.00 or more in fees tacked on. Yes, these people should have paid their accounts a long time ago, but this is crazy. And I’m the one who takes the heat for it. I completely sympathize with these people, even though the #1 rule of debt collections is to never feel bad for the debtor. Ever try telling an 84-year-old low-income grandmother that they’re going to destroy her credit, freeze her current bank accounts, prevent her from opening any future ones, and involuntarily collect the debt from whatever meager income she receives if she doesn’t help line Bank of America’s already deep pockets? The fees are punitive and completely excessive, and to add insult to injury, I have to justify them to the debtor.
I have my own personal reasons for needing to cash my paychecks at Bank of America. Yesterday I went in to do this, and one of the employees asked me if I’ll need a deposit slip while I waited in line. I told her no, I’m not a customer. So it’s my turn to talk to the teller, and I walk up to the counter which is completely encased in bulletproof glass (do Banks of America get robbed more often than other banks? So much for friendly, face-to-face service). I cash my check, and as I was walking out, the same woman smiles her practiced smile at me and asks, “So you’ll be a new customer next time you come in here, right?” I took an almost evil glee in shooting back, “Nope, never will. I hate your bank.”
So fuck you, Bank of America. Fuck you for taking advantage of your loyal customers. Fuck you for charging for the oxygen your customers breathe in your banks which resemble the visitor waiting room at Abu Ghraib. Fuck you for wallowing in your bottomless, money-drenched pit of greed. I hope to God that Eliot Spitzer tracks you down like the flea-bitten dogs you are and slaps you with a fine bigger than Mel Gibson’s ego.
Oh, and on a more positive note, I’d like to give a hearty shout-out to Chevy Chase Bank for their almost nonexistent fees, numerous, convenient, open-seven-days-a-week locations, superior online banking, and top-notch customer service. You guys rock!
About a year ago Mr. Carmichael accidentally transposed two numbers in our checkbook balance ledger. (Instead of writing, for example, $328, he wrote $382.) We ended up bouncing something like 6 checks. The total of those checks was less than $50, but City National Bank still hit us with $180 in fees. They did forgive some of it but we still ended up paying like, 4 or 5 times the amount we were actually overdrawn in fees.
My ass is still chapped over that. City National Bank shakes chickens in hell.
In a total coincidence, I just called BoA and cancelled a credit card I had with them. I had paid it off in July 2003 and hadn’t used it in the last year and just got hit with a $35 annual fee. I have one active card and one emergency one so I decided, after paying the $35 and waiting a week, to close it out.
Thus ends a 22-year relationship with the Bank of America. I had a little savings account when I was a teenager, of course, for the after-school job money, in a local bank, but when I went to Boston for college I got my first adult account with BoA.
Or, to be accurate, with BayBank (Norfolk). Which swallowed Shawmut Bank, which got swallowed itself by Fleet (aka Fleece) Bank, which just got et up by BoA, which just changed all the green Fleece signs to red BoA signs all over its fee-greedy ATMs all over NY and Boston and points in between.
I would pit the bank that (grudgingly) gave me my mortgage, but that’s another thread. It’s worldwide, I believe, and while I won’t discuss it here my lawyer and I have nicknamed it Horribly Slow Banking Calamity.
When I had my business accounts there, there were always transposed numbers when I deposited my checks for my services, usually happened about every three months and made a mess of my account. One error was $270 bucks…($360 deposited instead of $630).
Teller asked me if I was an account holder - I replied that I would not wish to be and I will tell creditors that are BoA customers that I will not accept checks drawn on BoA.
CCB is not much better. Chumps have branch offices in the food stores but can’t even accept simple deposits.
So, let me get this straight - you’re angry because the bank that you angrily refuse to become a member of charges you a fee for cashing your checks there? You’re not a member of the bank, but you insist on using them for a service. This is standard practice at every bank across the country. It beats the hell out of the percentage you’d be charged if you went to one of those “checks cashed, no questions asked” places.
Why wouldn’t you just deposit the check into your own bank account?
I’m a current BoA customer (5 years now), and haven’t noticed their practices being any more irritating than any given other bank. All banks are guilty of the things you pit BoA for - charging huge overdraft fees per check.
If you want to hear some horror stories, let me tell you about my old First Union account (since swallowed up by Wachovia) - they would often hit me with unexplained fees - usually only a few bucks - but it was completely arbitrary, random, and unexplained (they’d show up on my statement as “105948G Fee - $2.79” , etc. Since I was in college at the time, my account would often have less than $5 in it, and then one of these random, unexpected fees would overdraw the account, at which point they’d hit me with a $30 overdraft fee…
I’ve been a Bank of America member for about three months now – not very long, I know – and haven’t had the first problem with them. All the tellers were nice, courteous, and extremely helpful in setting up my savings, checking, and credit card and the one time I thought I might have lost some money, they worked with me for twenty minutes, two different people, to help me find out what the problem was.
Never had an overdraft either. I just make sure I ***always ***have money in my checking account and am careful. Has worked for me so far.
There is a simple solution to this problem: Don’t cash checks where you don’t have an account.
I have been using the big national banks for years, and I have never once had to pay a fee for having a checking account or writing checks, pay a fee for use of that bank’s own ATMs, pay a fee for depositing checks into my account, or pay a multiple fee fee. Yet I hear complaints about these absurd practices all the time. So why do people stay with such shitty banks?
Luckily, I’ve never had to deal with an overdrawn check, since I rarely write checks anyway.
Freejooky and friedo , let me draw your attention back to the OP, where Agent Foxtrot points out that this was a payroll check, drawn on the BoA. I think this is the heart of his rant. Even though it doesn’t affect me personally (I don’t do business with banks), it find it somewhat upsetting also. The BoA already has a business relationship with whatever employer issued the payroll check, and, presumably, is making some type of profit off the fees associated with that account. It doesn’t seem fair that they should then be able to turn around and gouge the hapless, non-customer, employee who simply wants to collect his earned wages from the account.
Way back in the day, 30+ years ago, when I worked for a bank, I believe this would have been contrary to banking regulations. Checking accounts were called “demand” accounts, and a bank was required to honor checks drawn on their accounts, as long as sufficient funds were available and the individual presenting the check had positive identification. It would not have been legal (to the best of my knowledge) to collect a fee for that service.
Banking regulations have changed dramaticallly over the years, and as far as i know what BoA is doing is legal now. Still sucks, though, IMHO.
I missed the part about the check being drawn on BoA, but still, the problem has an easy solution. Get your own account, anywhere, and deposit the check.
Yep, Bank of America truly does suck pus-filled donkey balls, and I wouldn’t do business with them if they were the last available bank in the world and my only other choice would be to stuff my cash under the mattress.
We had the misfortune of having to deal with them indirectly when we sold our house. The buyers were getting their mortgage through BoA, and when the date of the closing came, the paperwork was not ready. When the buyers called to find out what was going on, the snotty cunt of a mortgage manager told them the paperwork would be done “when it was finished” and refused to give them any idea of exactly when that might be. This caused a whole chain reaction of other unfortunate events, up to and including delaying the closing on the new house we were buying, because the down payment for that was coming from the money we were getting for the house we were selling. Luckily for us, everyone else involved with this clusterfuck on our end was understanding, helpful and flexible.
I don’t know if the buyers ever did anything about that bitch, but I sure hope they did. A whole lot of people were kept waiting and wondering what was going on, and I can’t believe that highly unprofessional behavior like that would be tolerated. Though maybe at BoA that’s their standard method of doing business.
Our credit unions, on the other hand, absolutely rock, and I’ll never, ever do business with a bank again.
Here’s what I remember from my retail banking experience, two decades past: Business customers get charged for every little thing they do. This included cashing payroll checks. Most of the businesses who had arranged to have their payroll checks cashed at our branch ate the fees and didn’t pass them along to their employees, but a few did. Branch customers would have the fee waived. Not bank customers…branch customers. That seems to be the good ol’ days, though, as I can now walk into any of my current bank’s branches and cash personal checks (i.e. mor ethan the ATM will give) with no hassle. I never try cashing checks written to me, drawn on any bank, so I don’t know what the policies are there.
Just please don’t take it out on the tellers, who have zero say in any of the policies, cannot override them, and whose complaints about policies that cause problems will not be listened to.
And how would that get him cash that moment, that instant? If it’s BoA deposited at First Onion (Whacked Over Ya) but drawn on an out of town account (like corporate headquarters) it can take several days, if not weeks, for his account to have the funds available.
So to save waiting two weeks for his money, BOA instead charges him five dollars to withdraw money they’re already taking a profit from.
As long as we’re pitting banks - a big FU to Chase Manhattan for giving minimum-wage broke part-time workers large handfuls of individual pieces of paper with people’s names, addresses, phone numbers, and full credit card numbers for the purposes of conducting a survey on customer service. That place had no security, no cameras, no checks and balances system, no way of preventing one or a hundred of those slips from wandering from the building to be wrangled into fraudulent credit card charges or identity theft crimes.
I have two sisters. The nice, sweet, wonderfully funny one keeps winning Elementary School Teacher of the Year. The mean, bitchy, divorced one is an incredibly successful VP with Bank of America. They’re both extremely well-suited for their jobs.
