I moved across the country last year. Wells Fargo doesn’t really do personal banking out here on the other coast. I specifically asked around for suggestions on “someplace that is as unlike Wells Fargo as it is possible to be while still being legally classified as a bank”.
They are utter wankers. They ate the bank my account had been with while I was in college and were complete soulless bastards from then on. If I had any idea how to make a voodoo doll of an entire banking institution, I would have. And everyone else I knew who banked with them would have volunteered to help me set it on fire.
I went through this earlier this year. I found out they had charged me $13.00 for my new monthly fee. I immediately went down and closed my account and opened one at a credit union. I love it, no fee, free online banking and bill pay. I can’t imagine why anyone would stay and pay these high fees.
To me, the worst thing about these large conglomerate banks is not necessarily the gotcha-fees, though those are bad…
It’s that if you’re a low-balance customer (and low-balance isn’t just people who only keep a few hundred bucks in there), you closing your account and going somewhere else doesn’t really hurt them all that much.
Now if kajillions of people did it, it would be a bank run and that would dent the big banks. But most people are complacent, and so the big banks will try everything they can to squeeze money out of you without getting their hands slapped (either by customers or regulators).
Why people don’t shop around at local/regional banks (who often are desperate for business and have some sweet deals) or credit unions (who have other benefits), I don’t know.
I worked for Wachovia for awhile and I went to a different job partially because I was incensed at the way customers were treated. I’m now at a small local bank and a lot happier as both customer and employee.
Smart move. And if that would be your only account, stop reading now.
But, if you had a $5,000 (or maybe $10K) IRA account with a bank you’d probably get free checking and savings. Credit Unions are fine most of the time, but I still like the idea of having one account at a big bank, just in case. Just make sure the account is free of periodic fees and fees for routine transactions.
For heavens sake don’t overdraw a bank account or let an account get garnished or hit with a subpoena. The bank fees for those things are horrendous.
The current banking system pits professional bankers with strong ties to lawmakers against Joe Schmoe. It’s not a fair system, and when the unfairness is pointed out, it’s labelled as “war on the job creators”.
Make sure I’ve got this. You blame the company that disclosed to you their fee schedule and when they lived up to their side of the agreement, and charged you the fee for 12 months in a row and you finally realized that you had made a bad choice of agreeing to put money in a fee account, it their fucking fault. :rolleyes:
Even in my worst poverty days I never ran afoul of the ordered withdrawal thing. Hearing people complain about getting hit by that always drew a “Wait, you’re carelessly writing checks that may or may not overdraw your account, and you’re blaming THE BANK on this one?” response from me.
My experience may not be the common one, but I was the same way until my former bank began altering the time it took for a deposit to clear. It went from full deposit in 24 hours to half in 24. Then $100. These were the announced changes. Then it just started changing randomly. It became common for a check drawn on the same bank to take three days to clear. At one point, checks could take up to six days to clear. Stated policy be damned. My deposits would post whenever they felt like posting them and not a moment sooner.
During this time I racked up quite a few overdraft fees because my bank, however reticent they were to credit any deposits to my account, was more than happy to allow debits to clear instantly. Apparently it was silly of me to deposit a check on Wednesday and think I could spend any money on the following Sunday. Overdraft fees would naturally add up while they held my deposit for the requisite 2-6 days. I fought and won several times, getting the overdraft fees refunded, but wound up closing my account. The only way I could keep my account straight was to check it online on a daily basis and to never ever ever use it ever.
My new bank (small and local) posts deposits within twelve hours and actually posts credits before debits. I’ve since never even come close to overdrafting.
Did or did not the OP read his bank statements for an entire year?
BTW, my bank seems to like me a lot, despite the fact that I have never once paid a fee to have an account, nor an ATM fee (except at the strip joint that one time.) Nor have I ever paid to get a new ATM card, or dispute a suspicious charge, or send bill payments online (including sending paper checks for payees who don’t take ACH. The bank even pays for the stamp.) I’ve never had to pay to buy a roll of quarters for the laundromat or get something notarized, either. And I’m not even a billionaire or anything. My balances rarely exceed the low four figures, because I keep most of my assets in investments. About the only thing I recall paying for is my safe-deposit box and a new book of checks once every five years.
So I ask in all seriousness: is it really that hard to find a major bank that won’t shove a corkscrew up your ass every chance they get? Because in 20 years of banking with the same bank I have literally never had this kind of thing happen. It is a totally alien concept to me. Yet I constantly hear about people paying to have a personal bank account. Why? I am genuinely curious, not trying to be snarky.
I think it depends on the area, and the time. Back when my husband and I first moved back to Fort Worth, most of the banks wanted a fairly large deposit, and they wanted a minimum balance that was about half a year’s gross salary for us. Otherwise, they wanted their fees on EVERYTHING. Teller fees, check fees, monthly fees, ATM fees (on every individual transaction, so if you deposited a check and withdrew money at the same time, that was two transactions), plus of course NSF fees if applicable. And the credit unions were pretty small, and in inconvenient locations, and their debit cards weren’t widely accepted yet at other ATMs and sometimes at local stores. Yet we found it was worth the trouble to find a credit union that would allow us to join under Bill’s stepfather’s account (just about the only time that old SOB did us any favors).
The thing is, there were and still are a lot of money stores around here, places where you can cash your paycheck and get money orders and send remittances. We have a very large Hispanic (both legal and illegal) and AA population, and a lot of them don’t trust banks, for whatever reason. So banks tend to want to go after people who can afford to keep several thousand bucks idling in their checking and savings accounts, and to hell with the person who is working a minimum wage job.
Makes sense. There’s definitely plenty of competition for retail banking around these parts. I suppose living in the capital of capitalism has its advantages.
I look forward to the day when your employer comes to you saying: “Agent Foxtrot, we feel you were far too smooth-talking during our salary negotiations, and moreover, you would have taken the job even if we offered you 30% less. It was just your greed that led you to seek out more money. So our quote-unquote “agreement” notwithstanding, you’re taking a 30% haircut on your paychecks, effective as of the first day after last payday.”
…and your undoubtedly placid response to this very reasonable and fair decision.
It can be difficult if you can’t keep a balance in the low four figures. I’ve have never paid an account fee,or a fee for ATM withdrawals at my own bank, for online bill pay etc. But I exceed the minimum balance requirement and have direct deposits. My son on the other hand rarely has a balance over $1000, and can’t get direct deposit through his part-time job. So when the bank where he had a free checking account was bought by a bigger bank and imposed fees, he had to find another bank that offered free checking accounts. Of course, this bank doesn’t have a branch on every corner, and his balance is still low, so now he ends up with fees for using foreign ATMs if he doesn’t plan ahead - but at least there aren’t any fees for his own bank’s ATMs or a monthly fee just to have an account.
Yeah, we bank with Wells Fargo and I don’t pay fees at all. But they are holding IRAs, stock accounts, savings accounts, etc well in excess of what is required to have a PMA account.
Big companies have learned this mean trick over the years.
When they have a dispute with a customer, they offer to settle it for pennies on the dollar. Then, if you accept the money, legally speaking, you have agreed to settle the matter and you can’t come back and try and sue them or get more money from them.
It is just a ploy to try and further cheat the customer. But don’t blame the customer service rep. In most cases, they probably don’t even understand the reason for this policy. They are just following a scripted policy.
BTW, insurance companies are even worse than banks.
They’ll rob you even after you’re dead.
Many states now have laws that ‘abandoned accounts’ (usually defined as 1-2 years of inactivity) have to be turned over to the state government, and then appear in those big newspaper advertisements listing abandoned accounts and how to claim them if you own them or are heirs of the person who owned them.
So banks instituted an ‘annual inactivity fee’ that was charged to an account with no other activity that year. But that counted as a transaction, so the bank didn’t have to turn the account over to the state, they just kept it as an open account, until they drained it all away via these annual fees. Sure, at a small fee, it may take decades, but the bank is patient. They’ll get the money in the end. And better than turning it over to the state government, who will actually make some effort to locate the owner.
Most banks did this. Some still do, even though it’s supposed to be illegal. If you ‘agree to it’ in the fine print of the forms you sign when opening an account…
Here’s a fairly new method they use to get more overdraft fees:
If you’ve had an overdraft within 90 days, you are a ‘risky account’ – so deposits are held an extra few days before being credited to your account. So a cash-poor college student gets an overdraft, begs money from his parents to cover the account, deposits it … and gets several more overdrafts because the bank accepted that money, but doesn’t credit his account for a few days. Ka-ching!
I spent several years working for Wells Fargo’s predecessor, programming computers to screw customers in various ways. Some days you felt like you needed to bathe as soon as you got home from work!
Quit fucking whining. Quit trying to rationalize the penalty for your own inattention as “robbery”.
When you signed up for the savings account, they said they’d take $10 per month as a fee (probably if your balance was below some amount) and you agreed to it.
Then you don’t pay attention for a while, and they keep doing what they said they were going to do, and that you agreed that they could do, and now they’re robbing you?
You didn’t pay enough attention over the course of an ENTIRE YEAR to notice and possibly transfer the balance into another account, withdraw it and close the account or something else.
This is absolutely, completely and wholly your own fault, and you should man up and get over it. This kind of whining and claims of robbery just steam me; you agreed to it even! Grude has a legitimate claim of having been robbed, but you’re just whining.
I’m curious. This is about the 4th pitting of Wells Fargo I’ve seen here. I remember because each time I’m tempted to add my 2 cents about WF. Is there a bank with more pit action than that one?