Money Matters
lbonga1
member
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Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Bank of America credit card frustrations
I'm getting pretty fed up with Bank of America. I've already closed my checking account with them, and now I'm going to close my credit card because of this nonsense. I had used the credit card for the tuition for a certificate program that I was in, and I use it occasionally for some other things. So last month right after the statement close date, I received some tuition refunds from my school. The refunds gave my account excess funds of almost $500, so I called them to have them transfer the money to me since I wasn't sure I was going to spend that much on the card for the rest of the month. Because of that, I assumed I didn't need to make a minimum payment because they would have also had to send that money back to me anyway. So then they charged me a late fee??
I called and spoke to argued with someone about how that didn't make any sense, so they finally agreed to wave the fee. Now it's been about a week, and I logged into my account this morning to see if the fee has been removed...and I can't even view my transactions because I haven't paid the $4.95 minimum payment. Are you kidding me? I can't view my transactions because I didn't want to waste my time making a payment when I don't owe anything, and they'd have to send the money back to me anyway? Please tell me I'm not the only one that this doesn't make any sense to.
Re: Bank of America credit card frustrations
I totally understand not wanting to do business with a company you dislike but, if it is a card you have had for years, keep it and make one charge to it every six months or so to keep it active. Age of your credit lines is a medium factor in calculating your credit score.
Personally, my score is dragged down largely because the average age of my current open accounts is only 3 years. Never mind that I have had good credit of some kind or another for over 20 years. It is one of the things that aggravates me about how credit scores are calculated.
I actually worked my way through college as a teller at both BofA and Wells Fargo. But that was back when I still lived in CA. They don't have either one of those banks in the NOLA area.
This! We love our credit union! It's our primary checking and savings. We also have a car loan with them. They have great rates and really great customer service! We do have a checking with a local bank (it was H's original bank). We really like them for our mortgage (we refinanced with them, huge savings!) and my employer uses the same bank so my HSA is through there also.
Although, we just did a refi and my wife isn't on that card and her credit scores were the same as mine, so I actually wonder if killing it would hurt me long term.
Then I have a Chase Freedom Visa with the next highest limit. It used to be a MasterCard. They forced converted it to Visa. Wasn't too happy about that.
Next is a Discover card.
And then I have a Kay card that I seriously need to close. I got it to get the 0% offer on my wife's engagement ring not realizing I was opening a credit card. Wasn't happy once that showed up in the mail.
Haha, that reminds me. At about the same time I was buying my car two years ago, I also received an $1800 escrow overage check from my mortgager (Whitney). Which I was going to use for part of my down payment. So I pop on down to my bank where, at the time, I had both my mortgage and checking account there. Give them cash and that check (to be cashed) with the money then going to my cashier's check.
The teller says I have to deposit the check, with a hold, because I don't have a high enough balance in my account. I tell him I don't understand because the check is FROM Whitney directly and is drawn on a Whitney account. Granted, I just assumed that. I hadn't actually looked. He then shows me the check is drawn on a BofA account. I literally said, "Are you actually telling me that Whitney Bank doesn't even bank with itself?"
He tried to get it approved by one of the managers. Who said, although he didn't have a problem with the check itself because it was from Whitney, he couldn't approve it because the check could be fraudulent. Fraudulent? Hmmm...yeah....that's a tough one. I don't know how he could have resolved that outside of making a 3 minute phone call to their escrow department (sarcasm).
I did deposit the check. Ended up having to make part of my down payment with credit cards. As soon as the check cleared, I paid my credit cards off, then I closed my account. I'd had other problems with them, but this craziness was the last straw.
Honestly, this is one of those areas where I think banks need to join the 21st century, but banks don't like to update their technology (that's a topic for another thread). It shouldn't take days/weeks to verify checks in this day and age.
I also think there's a problem where they take the check for deposit, make the funds available, but then rescind the funds. But this is why the banks don't care to fix the problem. They're not on the hook for the bad check. You are.
Funds availability is actually a customer courtesy. If you have any inclination that a check is no good, you have responsibility to not use the funds. People generally get upset when holds are placed on their deposits, but if a hold is not placed, funds are made available, and the check returns, people are upset. You (general you) can't have it both ways. You either don't get upset when the bank holds the funds, or you don't blame the bank when the check returns unpaid.
When 9/11 happened and all the airlines were grounded, the ones flying cancelled paper checks around too, the banks couldn't do business. Then, legislation called Check 21 was created. It caused the banks to have to have a way to scan the paper check and then share the scanned image of it (front and back) with the other bank it was drawn off of to debit the account. If you noticed right after 9/11, people stopped getting their cancelled checks back and instead could only receive images. So, in that regard banks have joined the 21st Century.
If you take a paper check to a branch, it still has to physically go out of the branch to be scanned somewhere at a central location by a fast-moving scanner. Then, that image has to be shared with the bank the check is drawn from. So, there is a lag time.
One could argue that individual branches should do the scanning, but that just isn't feasible. They have neither the time nor the person power to do it. Plus, some branches are so busy (one branch I worked for in the Denver area did an average of 24,000 PER DAY!), that they just cannot handle that extra work in the day.
For as long as we have paper checks - we will need to have a way to scan them and process then off site away from the branch locations. For as long as there is this lag time, banks will have to place holds on checks for a variety of reasons. And, there are a ton of reasons, because there are a lot of dishonest folks out there.
If we can get rid of paper checks altogether or make the society 100% honest, then we can solve this issue.
In 2016 there's no reason a check couldn't be verified as fast as a credit card except it would cost the banks money to implement the process.
Although, unless I'm missing something, there's nothing in the Check21 processes that prove that I actually wrote the check?
Sorry, didn't mean to turn this into a debate.
Well, Check 21 is actually short for the Check 21 Act, which is a Federal Law that was implemented in 2004. So, yes the banks lost money after 9/11, but the main issue behind Check 21 was not having any future disruption to the banking system.
Well, the ink on all checks, called a MICR code at the bottom is where the routing number and account number are located. It's actually magnetic ink and it can be read by the scanners.
Technologically speaking, and I am not an expert in this by any means, for a check to be processed as fast as a credit or a debit card, it would have to contain some form of binary code (right?) that could be read by computers thus crediting and debiting accounts very quickly. CCs and DCs are so fast because they completely interface via binary code with the systems that can translate the debits and credits into series of 1's and 0's.
Currently, I don't know of any technology by which binary code can be embedded in a piece of paper. Perhaps it exists. If it does, perhaps it is too cost prohibitive at this point to utilize in a wide-spread means for the hundreds of thousands of checks that are processed every week.
Checks like cash, do have other security features like micro print and water marks. Like the newest $100 bill, I have seen some checks with security tapes running through them. But, they are still just paper, at least until paper checks either go away or until we get technology to make them more like CCs and DCs.
Banks lose a lot of money for not placing holds if a check is cashed and it turns out to be a fraud. But, overall holds do protect the customer and his/her own money.
ETA: I forgot to answer your question about a check writer's ID. The point of Check 21 wasn't to verify ID it was to prevent a shut-down of the banking system. So no, Check 21 would not verify a check writer's ID. If I saw a strange check and it were for a lot of money and it were drawn on my bank, I may call the branch of the account or find the signature on record for the account to verify a signature. But, when a check is presented, there are little to no ways of verifying who wrote the check. For cashing a check, if a person is a non-customer I would ask for their government issued ID and many banks take a finger print. If the person cashing the check were an account holder with my institution, I would verify that and would verify that the person had sufficient funds in their account to cover then check if it came back unpayable. Depending on the amount, I would also look at the customer's overall account history like overdrafts, fee reversals, etc.. Good banking customers have little to none of these problems and if the account has been in good standing with more than or nearly sufficient funds to cover the check, I would likely cash it for them. Cashing larger checks can run into issues too. Branches don't have unlimited amounts of cash in their vaults. Smaller branches may only carry around $100k at any given time. Larger ones like the one I worked at in Denver carried $1-2 million. So if you brought me a $50k check and wanted it cashed, and I worked at a branch that only had $100k on hand that would be a problem. I've seen that happen before. It is commonly worked out so the bank places a special cash order for this particular customer. Anyway, there's a lot of nuances to branch banking and cash handling. Never a dull moment, really.