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Tricia
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« on: March 18, 2009, 08:08:23 AM » |
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I am a military spouse. My husband and I are now in Germany and are once again having problems with Bank of America, all starting last year when they restructured how they operate their online banking. They no longer place debits charges or withdrawals in the order that they happen, but however they feel like. So instead of having one overdraft you now have several, and of course the overdraft fees to go with. We've fought them several times on this issue, and they've refunded the overdraft fees each time, but only after we threatened to close our accounts. I even sent a complaint to the Better Business Bureau, and that's when I found out that they'd changed their policies last year. Their explanation: so that peoples car loans can go through. They don't care about the order of the transactions, which means my husband and I are barely living paycheck to paycheck because we've had to keep paying their overdraft fees.
All of that happened when we were still in the States. Over here, my husband noticed some erroneous transactions, so he of course cancelled his card. Since I was due to arrive within a day or so and we were in the process of switching banks, he didn't request a new one. We just figured that when his paycheck came in he would transfer the money to my account and I could pull out the cash we needed. This actually turned out to be a problem since after I got here they adjusted already cleared transactions with ones I hadn't even seen as pending so that I now had several overdraws and the fees to go with it. Had my husband transfered the money to my checking account we would have barely enough money to get food for one week, let alone the two weeks until payday. So we decided to transfer the money to my savings, which was not overdrawn. but, oh wait, we can't do that since you need an atm card to set up a transfer, and HE CANCELLED HIS! And they won't do transfers over the phone, they won't even set it up over the phone so you can transfer online, because, again, he doesn't have an atm card. Thankfully, we were able to get the money to my savings through my brother. We pulled out some money in Euros so we could see the nearby town, but when we tried to pull out the rest in dollars it was an 'irregular transaction' so they wouldn't let us and put a hold on my card. We decided to transfer the money to the other bank.
Which has led to my current problem. Not only did it take several days to set up the feature to transfer to a non-bofa account, but they have a three day wait period, AND a $3 charge. So I go through the process (thankfully we had enough food for another couple of days) and they tell me the money would be in the other account by wednesday, today. But oh, guess what? They decided to charge the fees for using a non-bofa atm AFTER I put the request in, so now the amount I in my account isn't enough to cover the transfer action. So they just 'changed' the date that I put in the transfer request from sunday to monday, so now, apparently, the money will be in the other account tomorrow. I'm not holding my breath.
When I tried to depsoit some cash into my savings to make sure I had enough for a transfer, I found that I couldn't because the Community Bank over here, which is 'Operated' by BofA, has nothing to actually do the BofA. They can close BofA accounts just fine, since my husband was able to close his savings account, and you can withdraw money from the Community Bank ATM without any fees, but that's about it. I couldn't deposit money through the ATM, nor could I go to a teller to deposit anything because they don't have access to any BofA accounts. So now I have to hope that my brother checks his e-mail (since we haven't been able to get a phone because we DON'T HAVE ANY MONEY!) and deposits a few dollars into my account so the transfer can go through. What's the point of operating a Bank and giving them your logo if YOUR customers can't do anything with them? And we're going to have to go through an Army program to get a loan to clear my checking just so I can close my account.
I'm 24 years old, in my third trimester of pregnancy, have had a bank account since I was 15, been with Bank of America since I was 18, spent 4 years in the Army myself and though they've never said so in as many words their general attitude is that they know how to handle my money better than I do. That's complete bull since I didn't start having problems until they began pulling this crap.
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