I found this interesting article on Consumerist.com. It's about bank overdraft fees. Check it out as apparently, according to this article, bank overdraft fees are coming up for review in an upcoming bill.
Choice on Overdraft Fees
I have to say that I agree with some of the commenters. I'd rather my check bounce than for the bank to cash it and tack on all of its fees. I was interested to learn that banks process checks largest to smallest instead of order received. This makes sense, as sometimes I've looked at my online banking and wondered why this or that went through instead of something else. Makes sense. If you bounce a bunch of little charges instead of one big charge you owe more bank fees. Granted, the obvious solution is to never write a bad check. But people do make mistakes and I do think that the overdraft fee thing is definitely "kicking you while you're down."
When I was looking for work once we had gotten ourselves into a hole due to miscalculating a couple of checks. That ONE mistake led to fees and more checks bouncing. Before we knew it we were so negative that every check that my husband made brought us less negative and we couldn't get our account positive. So we had no access to any of his paychecks and our account was negative for a month. We knew that our tax return was due in our account soon and that would bring us positive. Also, I had found a job and had just started training. That's when something wonky happened with our online banking. It suddenly showed a $0 balance. I called the bank to find out they had shut our account down...yeah...a day or two before our tax return was due to deposit into that very account!!! My hubby had to make all kinds of calls to get them to open our account back up. And I might add that the bank people were very snotty and high and mighty. Anyways, that's just one story to show how the bank system can really screw someone.
What do you think? Would you rather the bank reject your check or cash it and pass on overdraft fees to you?
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I would rather they cash it and pass the fees on to me. The company that you sent it to originally is going to charge you even more fees if it comes back to them AND they usually try to send it through twice.
ReplyDeleteI don't know what bank you use, but Wells Fargo always (in the rare cases this has happened to me) cashes it and charges me $35 per check. The last bank I used though, would 'bounce' it, and sendit back to the person I wrote it to... and charge me $20 for that too. So it is a lose/lose situation.
If you are in a position where you see you are going to bounce several things, it is always better to get yourself a quick loan (title, payday, direct deposit advance, mom) because the fees you pay there will surely be less than even two or three overdrafted checks.
Lastly, if this is a very rare occurence, you can always call customer service at your bank (or email them) and sincrely apologize for the error, explain to them how desperately you need your $35 and that you fixed the account by bringing it back to positive, and ask that they reverse it this one time as a courtesy. Their first response will likely be 'no', but often an email reply back asking them to reconsider will get your fee back. That will work about once a year.