It can’t always be done. Not without going without food, or becoming homeless, etc. Sometimes the “means” is NOT enough to live on. It’s also true that sometimes, it’s expensive to be poor. You get charged money for not having money in an astonishing array of circumstances.
I’m not getting into the discussion about how banks are or not evil blah blah blah but this statement stood out to me and I had to call it out, because it’s just not true.
I do have one example of fees eating your soul to throw out there for interest’s sake*: I had a Capital One credit card many, many, many years ago. It had a crazy low limit like $200 or something. The minimum payment was something like $15, and one month I missed a payment because we didn’t have the money until later (we were living pretty hand-to-mouth at that time). They charged me something like a $39 late fee, which pushed my account over the limit. Then they charged me a $39 overlimit fee. When we sent the next month’s payment, they took it as the previous month’s payment, late, rather than the current month, with a missed month. Took me a couple of months of this to catch on to that, and in the meantime, each month they added the extra $39 late fee and the extra $39 overlimit fee. By then the fees had piled up to the point that I could not afford to make a payment that would bring my account under the limit. Eventually they closed the account and I owed them something like $700 when I’d only ever had about $190 in actual charges. All the rest of it was fees. I eventually settled with them for less than the total but still far more than I actually owed in charges.
I’m not putting any blame on anybody else for that, just saying that yeah, fees can suck, BTDT.
*(ha! see what I did there? I said interest… get it?
Yeah, go ahead and go fuck yourself. Contrary to what a lot of you seem to believe, banks provide a service.
We provide credit lines that small businesses uses to pay their weekly payroll.
We provide loans for you to buy a car.
We provide loans for you to buy a house (and most of those that banks make are “prime” mortgage loans and affordable to the people that take them.)
We provide the credit cards that you use.
You know what? I said it earlier and I’ll say it again. If you don’t like the way a bank is treating you, leave. Get out. Go to a different institution.
You will only have a problem getting an account if your credit sucks (although most banks will overlook medical collections/overdues), or if you’re listed on Chexsystems (they are a CRA that tracks mostly checking accounts.)
The whining and bitching going on here is unbelievable. You want to use a bank, but you bitch when they provide services which they disclosed when you got involved in the relationship with them.
People bitch about credit card rates and fees. No one ever made you use them!
That’s right. We live in a tough world. Where people try to make money, and I’m one of them. I do damn good work that provides a great benefit to my community and my bank. If you want to talk further about it, please feel free to take this to the pit, because I can’t stand another second of this complaining about something that you had been told about.
Guess what, if you had a mother, I’m sure she told you at one point that, “The world ain’t fair”. If you didn’t have a mother, than I’ll give that to you as free advice.
As further information, water is wet and fire can, and probably will burn you. Since some of you couldn’t seem to figure out that other stuff…I thought I’d throw that out to warn you.
Frankly, I am neither smug nor self satisfied. I don’t have one brazillion dollars in my account; I have about $200 at the moment. But I am responsible enough to know when to not buy shit. I can decide which bills to prioritize, and what I don’t really need.
Most of those circumstances being those you’ve put yourself in. No one has forced anyone to open an account, let alone overdraw it. And we have a fundamental disagreement about being able to live within means, so I think it best to just leave it at that.
And we’ve agreed. Fees can suck, and the situation can suck. No one’s suggesting otherwise.
Request to mods: Can we move this into the Pit, perhaps?
I remember being 18 years old in 1990, having just gotten out of high school. I had no job experience, and nobody was hiring. Couldn’t even find a job in food service. I lived without a phone (for years), without electricity (for well over a month, ending only when the Salvation Army stepped in), scouring fast food drive-thru lanes at 3am for dropped change to buy food, or bumming quarters “for the phone” in front of the grocery store, then buying a bag of apples when I had enough, so I could eat for the next few days. I couldn’t even eat ramen because I had no way to cook it, having no electricity. I would go to Jack in the Box across the street from where I lived and they’d give me the fries that were too old to sell that they were going to throw away, and I’d eat those.
I didn’t have any accounts to open or overdraw, but I also didn’t have any means on which to live. I’m sorry that you’re so heartless that you think it’s my fault that I became an adult out on my own during a recession (and no, living at home was not something that was an option to me at the time, not by far) during which nobody was finding work, especially nobody who was fresh out of high school and had no experience. I guess when you have a high income like yours, you don’t really understand about what it’s like to be on the other side, and its easy to be judgmental up on that high horse.
So you are against usury laws. This is in direct conflict with what you said about being satisfied with present banking regulations. Make up your mind.
Let’s go with your example. The customer has $500 in the bank and debits another $630. If you process the checks smallest to largest they pay ONE fee of $35 to the bank for being NSF and one $35 returned check fee to the car company. The customer is now in the hole an extra $70 due to fees. They need to come up with $200 ($635 to the car company + $35 to the bank - $470 in the bank) to make themselves good again.
If you process the checks largest to smallest, they get hit with 2 NSF fees from the bank and then 2 more from the people that tried to debit the $10 and $20. So now they owe $140 in extra fees. In addition, they still need to come up with the $100 the bank is floating them before they try to make any more debits. They now need to come up with $270 ($140 in fees + $100 float + original $10 and $20 debit) to make themselves good again.
Seems to me that it would be easier to have to come up with $200 quickly than $270. And if they can come up with the money quickly, they can avoid the car repossession if it was even imminent. There is now way the car was about to be repossessed on the first bounced check, which means they were 5 or 6 payments behind.
All this boils down to your argument being that banks are willing to screw over all those other people that have full OD protection and all those people that make a small mistake in the name of trying to help the customer that is 5 or 6 payments behind on a car and is writing checks ($630 worth) on money they don’t really have ($500). In your scenario, the bank has now put the customer $70 deeper in the whole then they really needed to be.
Additionally, there is probably a pretty good chance the customer has the car loan with that very same bank, meaning the bank is paying themselves first and screwing over the $10 and $20 creditors.
Do you have any clue what QED means? You can’t possibly.
I don’t want this thread moved into the pit - start your own thread if it makes you happy, but leave mine just where it is.
When did I ever say that I wasn’t responsible enough to curtail my spending habits? You make it sound like I went on some sort of shopping spree, or worse, that I haven’t a clue how to prioritize my spending. I’m picking up on what many others are noticing; your attitude that people who bounce checks are lacking the money management techniques that wonderful you has down to a science. This is incredibly condescending, whether you are willing to admit it or not.
I simply forgot about a charge, and am willing to pay a reasonable fee for doing so. $105 is unreasonable. That is something that I hope we can all agree upon, and was the point of my OP.
I don’t expect the bank to go out of its way to minimize OD fees, but I would like it if they didn’t go out of their way to maximize them. My position is that the fairest approach would be process the items in the order they come, and leave it at that.
The time to decide that these fees are unreasonable is when you open the account and agree to them, not whenever it happens to bite you in the ass.
Re: OpalCat, I understand that it’s not possible to sometimes make ends meet with what you have. I never said it was always possible, I said we disagreed, and I’d rather leave it at that. I’m sorry that you were put in the position you were, and I understand the actions you took to get by.
Re: cmosdes, we can play the math however we like to make both situations plausible. In some scenarios, it works out for the consumer. In many, it works out for the bank. Regardless of the reasoning, I can’t find much fault in the bank for deciding how it processes charges – provided that methodology is disclosed up front. And if more people would bother to read those 18 pages of fine print, they might be aware of it.
Then come up with a reasonable situation that makes this better for the consumer. You already tried once and failed miserably. It isn’t just in many situations this is better for the bank. In all situations this is better for the bank. The only difference is that in a very, very tiny fraction (if any) of situations it also just happens to work out for the customer.
Some of us think excessive charges are unreasonable. You happen to be of the mind that excessive charges are just fine if they are disclosed. Fine and dandy. But don’t for a moment try to defend excessive charges by saying they are to the benefit of the consumer.
The order in which they are applied can benefit the customer. For some people, the extra cost you pay in fees may be worth having that important check clear. That’s a benefit I’d enjoy having, depending on the circumstances.
But it sounds like ALL of the cheques are being cleared - doesn’t it? The bank is charging $35 to clear the cheques despite there not being enough $$ in the account. That seems fair I suppose, and it could be a good thing. However, if I write 4 cheques, and my account has enough to cover three of them totally, and the forth one not at all, to me that means that cheques 1, 2 and 3 should clear, and the bank should bounce cheque 4 (the one that’s bigger than the amount in the account).
If they don’t bounce cheque 4 then they can let my account go into over draft and charge me the $35 handling fee or whatever.
However, assuming cheques 1, 2, and 3 hit the account first, it seems pretty shady to start tweaking things so that cheque 4 is processed first resulting in all the cheques bouncing.
Here’s the thing–there’s nothing shady because they don’t change the rules. They disclose, up front, that they either
(a) Clear transactions that are presented on the same day from largest to smallest, or
(b) Have discretion in choosing how to clear items
They give you the rules up front, so there’s no need to tweak them mid-game. If the customer finds the rules fair, they play. If they don’t, they can walk.
No, not always. See my example – depending on your bank’s policies, it may or may not clear your check. It may or may not provide you a certain amount of wiggle room in which they’ll honor your checks. My bank, by default, will honor anything up to $200 overdrafted, at which point they’ll start declining charges and bouncing checks. If I ask them to, they’ll deactivate the amount they’ll float me and start bouncing things when I hit zero.
They claim that they charge the largest first because large amounts are most likely for mortage, rent or car payments but it is not like some one is actually looking at these checks or transactions and determining that they are for such purposes. There is no bank teller looking at your account and thinking hmm well they have five transactions here and they don’t have enough money but I see one is to ABC Mortgage Company so I will put that though first so it will clear and let the gum purchase bounce.
They just do largest to smallest no matter which one got to the bank first. Like the OP I had written a check I forgot to write down. I had made some debit card purchases that all went through fine when I made them but the check I forgot about was the largest transaction.
So it went through and then all the other transactions bounced and this happened three days after they they were approved at the stores.
If the check had truely gotten there first then the debit card transactions would have never been approved. They don’t care about the time the transactions were made they care about the amount.
My son had a transaction bounce once that is to long of story to get into but not only did they charge him a $35 OD fee but they continued to charge him an additional $35 for every week that he was overdrawn. Luckly they did reverse half of the fees but that still sucks ass.
I am a professional debt collector, with about 18 years of experience in the industry. :rolleyes:
If I insult you, there will be no doubt in anyone’s mind that it was an insult, and it will not happen in MPSIMS.
Also, it’s better to “report post” (click on the little red bordered triangle in the top right corner of the offensive post) when you feel some one has insulted you.
You claim this and even claimed to have proven it. The one example you provided was bogus so now I’d really like you to present something to back this claim up.