Sometimes corporations ARE evil

You might notice that many, if not most of my blog posts are full of whining. That's because I don't get to whine in real life because no one listens to me. In fact, I spend a large part of my day listening to other people whine. So I think it's only fair that you should have to tolerate the expression of my discontent, don't you?

So, in the spirit of the current economic crisis, I'm going to bitch about bank fees.

I understand overdraft fees. Of course you should be charged if you write checks that you don't have the funds to cover.

But why do some banks always clear larger checks first?

Let me tell you why. Better yet. I'll just quote this USA Today article from 2006.

Here's how high-to-low check processing works: Say you have $50 in the bank. And suppose three checks come in on the same day: for $20, $15 and $45. The bank would clear the $45 one first. That way, it could charge you a fee, of up to $35, for each of two checks bouncing. If it had cleared the lowest-amount check first, you'd incur only one bounced-check fee.

So, if your account is running low, they get to make more money. That's why they do it.

I once asked a bank manager about this. He tried to tell me that they always clear the large checks first because they assume that the bigger checks are the most important things, such as a mortgage payment, and that most customers would prefer that those checks clear. They must have all had a big meeting to come up with that BS, because the USA Today article says the same thing.

But we know better, don't we?

Here's another bank fee I love. A "deposit correction fee". That's right. If you bank at Suntrust, and you make an error on a deposit slip, they charge you $6.00 to correct it. At any other bank I have used, the teller would total up the checks, inform me if I had made an error, and simply correct it right then and there. At Suntrust, they do the totaling at the end of the day, and you are charged for your screw ups.

If you suck at math like I do, this could get really expensive.

But the fees that make me really angry are the "uncollected funds" fees. If you have a business account at SunTrust, and it ever gets a little low, you might get charged this fee. You can make a large deposit and they will make it "available" the very next day. Yep, you check your account, and every bit of it is available.

HOWEVER, you will be charged $32.00 PER TRANSACTION, because the money is not actually "collected" yet. They will claim that it takes anywhere from 2-7 days to collect your money. One month, we paid almost $1000 in uncollected funds fees. And it was all because SunTrust just would not make our money available to us.

We have since switched banks.

So what sparked this rant today?

Well...

This afternoon, I found a charge on my personal credit union account that I couldn't understand. It was called a "bad address fee". I called the bank and was told that they mailed something to me and it was returned. I verified my address with them, and they had the correct one. It's a post office box, and it's been the same one for years. But for some reason, the post office returned something that was mailed to me, and I got charged for that.

$5.00. Because a piece of mail was returned. Unbelievable.