Banks that Suck

Sorry, still no Haskell content. Please don't delete my blog! I'm working on it.

So, we were in the process of migrating our finances to a new bank, after our old bank, Republic, was pwned by Citizen's Bank and stopped doing all the things we liked about it, and started doing all the things we don't like (killing off our overdraft protection arrangement, stopping our various automatic repayment arrangements, removing access to our overdraft account from their online site, charging ludicrous fees, taking 3 days to clear electronic transactions, back-dating checks to try to hit is with more overdraft fees).

Based our on readings of their various rates and policies, we chose Midwest Financial Credit Union, here in Ann Arbor.

Less than a month later, we're now planning to close the accounts we just set up and continue our hunt for a decent bank that doesn't treat our accounts like an opportunity to slam us with fees at every opportunity -- just like Republic Bank didn't. I had my Republic account for about fifteen years and they helped me through many difficult times. Does such a place exist?

Midwest Financial got on our bad side immediately by taking ten calendar days to process a deposited $3,000 check -- while we were out of town. They finally managed to clear it (I think they took it to the originating bank in Erie, Pennsylvania by riding a mule along the old Erie Canal). It's in the fine print that they're allowed to do such things, apparently. (It's in the fine print that they can do just about anything they want, apparently).

Yesterday I tried to make a fairly large purchase (about $600) using a check card on the account -- it has a VISA logo). We have similar cards for our Citizen's Bank account and they function as either debit cards (with a PIN) or credit cards; they work fine, and we've never had an issue like this.

Anyway, the transaction was denied. Today I got word in my e-mail that a much smaller purchase (about $125) that I made online was also denied. Which is odd, because according to our most recent statement we had just shy of $3,000 in that account.

My wife went to the bank to talk to them and apparently someone's credit rating (possibly hers, since she opened the account) is rather low (we already knew that, thanks; that's old news, mostly from her days, now seven years gone, as an under-emplyed single mother), and therefore there is a $100 limit on transactions. Even though there is $3,000 in that account. Now, for a family of 5, $100 is not even a largish grocery store run. Some of these transactions could go through as debits, I guess, although there is probably some relatively low limit on the debit transactions as well. And we have a card with a VISA logo because not everyone is setup to handle PIN-based debit transactions.

They told her she can apply for a 48-hour waiver to make a large purchase, or in four months we can apply to have our "credit" limit raised.

This is all too much. We're going to do neither; we're going to fire this goddamn bank and get our money back. I'm giving serious thought to turning our money into gold, silver, and platinum bars and burying them in undisclosed locations! Maybe we'll just keep our old accounts; we're starting to get used to the exact ways they screw us, as opposed to all these new ways! We are very fortunate in that here in 2008 we are finally getting ourselves to the point where we have a little bit of a safety margin in our accounts, which kept us from getting stranded while we were out-of-state on vacation. But if we didn't have that margin -- if we were still living close to the edge -- we'd have been absolutely screwed. And having been that indebted slob for most of my life, I'm only going to do business with institutions whose policies are designed to be fair to that person, not to make their problems far worse.