An example, this past weekend was a long one. It was Valentines day Saturday, my daughters birthday Sunday, and my husbands birthday on Monday. I went shopping a few times, realized I needed to add a little more money and transferred it from my savings. All was well except for a couple outstanding $1.00 gas holds.
Tuesday comes and an automatic payment for my cell phones came out. I wasn't expecting it to come out for another day. So what my bank does is take that large cell phone payment out FIRST, which takes the majority of the money and then there were TEN (10) OD charges assessed from all my little purchases this past weekend. I would rather have had my cell phone payment returned instead of this! If you call them they just say that is the way it is, PERIOD.
This has happened before and my account was only short a couple dollars, but once they assess a fee, it overdraws it more and then it is like a snowball!! I read about this last year but never gave it much thought until it happened to me. It seems like it should be illegal or against some kind of regulation.
I am moving our accounts to a local credit union because it is hard enough keeping up now without paying some bank executives salary with my money. I made sure they do not have the same policies as PNC first, and the lady I talked to said she used to work for one of the banks and she knew EXACTLY what I was talking about. I don't know how some of those people sleep at night!
OH! I almost forgot, how quickly do banks report you to Chexsystems? My account is overdrawn and if I pay the whole thing now I won't be able to survive this week because I will have no money! I figured I would pay them a little at a time. So how long will I be safe from the Chex monster?
