The Scam We Are All Involved In: Banking

Just a few decades ago keeping your money in the bank was the safest thing you could do with it. Paying with a check was common and there was no hassle in comparison to today. We were not forced to have credit and/or debit cards and we didn't have to deal with limits, transaction clearing time, etc. Those were the good times when banks didn't control our lives.

Maybe you have read about the guy that went to Best Buy to purchase a $5.8k home theater system for his wife. He had more than enough in his Bank of America checking account, free and clear and his check card kept getting declined, he had to spend almost one hour on the phone, being transferred from department to department until he finally got to someone that could help him. Did he have any other options? No, no business would have taken a check for that amount and delivered the goods immediately. We don't know if he had a credit card or not, but makes no difference since he had the fund in his checking account. To summarize the situation, he had the money but the bank didn't want to let him spend it.

I myself have an account with Bank of America and I know exactly what he must have endured. I live on the state line, and for a while I worked in one state and my husband in the other. Since he worked for a small business, they didn't offer direct deposit. Since we were living paycheck to paycheck, as the majority of Americans do, the day he got paid, that money had to go into the bank account to pay the bills.

With his paycheck in hand, he had no good choices. He could go to the bank that the check was drawn on and pay a fee to have his paycheck cashed, and be humiliated by having to be finger printed just because he chose to do business with a different financial institution. He could go to a Bank of America branch in the state he worked in, and be told that since the account was out of the state it would be five business days till the funds cleared. He could go to a branch in the state we lived in and be told that he would have to wait five days for the funds to clear because the check was from out of state. Ultimately we would have to point out to the manager in the branch we were at that the check being presented was a paycheck and not a personal check, and the same check was being deposited every two weeks not being returned once, and then finally the manager would override the transaction. Would it have been so hard to place a note on the account so we didn't have to endure this every time? Probably the worst thing we tried to remedy this situation was to deposit the check at an ATM, it took a week until we had access to the money.

What makes this outrageous, in my opinion, is that the bank is earning interest in the money they are holding, and I am not seeing any of it, but if I happen to spend 2 cents more than I have available, even if I have enough on hold, I am presented with overdraft fees.

After all this, we tried skipping the middle man and just dealing with cash, and what a nightmare that was. For almost everything nowadays you need to have a credit card or a debit card with funds available to do many things, such as rent a hotel room unless you are ready to pay a steep deposit. And you can't use cash for many other things. Any recurring subscription service such as TiVo or online games, make you prepay a year or more of their services if you can't charge it to a card monthly.

Don't fool yourself thinking that this is a bank only problem, some credit unions are following their steps. If you have a lot of money, you're in luck and can do business off shore, it you're not rich find a small bank in your community and make sure that once it grows and stops treating you as a human being you take your business elsewhere. Banks have no loyalty to you, you shouldn't have for them.