Bank Penalties for Paper Checks
posted in Rantings |Geez sometimes I think I should just start a personal finance blog. Or bring up more pf entries. My rantings on USBank get the best traffic on the site.
When it comes to paying my bills, I’m kind of a luddite. I think I’ve mentioned this before. I don’t want automatic bill pay, I don’t want electronic bill pay, I just want to feel the check in my hand as I write it and send it out. It’s the same reason I used to keep track of my business accounts in a ledger book; I like the physicality of the process. It makes it seem more real to me. Besides; what if something went horribly wrong.
I’ve had so many problems with USBank and overdrafts that I signed up for email alerts; if our account goes below $50, I get an email, and if our account goes negative, I get an email. So it really surprised me when I got an email yesterday that our account had been overdrawn the day before. So, yeah, that’s another hundred bucks in overdraft charges. Completely avoidable if I had gotten the email the day it had happened (I had the money sitting in the savings account). I called USBank and bitched them out. They transferred me to the online services department who told me that this was “working as intended.”
Ok, I’m not arguing that it’s the bank’s responsibility to tell me when I’m overdrawn, but when they tell me that they’ll alert me when I am, then I expect them to tell me, ahem, when I am. I’m not blaming the bank for the fact that I was overdrawn. I take responsibility for that- but their system is supposed to let me know if something went awry.
They only send out emails three times a day, and paper checks go through all in the middle of the night sometime. Electronic tranfers are handled immediately, but paper is processed at the end of the day, which happens to eb about six hours before they send out emails.
So yeah, one paper check goes through, bam, you’re overdrawn, five electronic transfers get handled immediately, and suddenly you’re $200 overdrawn, and wake up to the musical ka-ching of US Bank’s registers.
This is from their FAQ regarding account alerts:
You will receive an alert when a transaction posts to your account that causes your available balance to become negative. Subsequent account activity may make your end-of-day available balance positive and prevent an overdraft condition.
So on 7/16, I had activity and could have made a deposit. However, I wasn’t alerted to this until 7/17, which meant that I got banged for the “overdraft condition.”
Are there any banks that treat their customers fairly? Jeez.
