The cost to overdraw a bank account could drop to as little as $3 under a proposal announced by the White House, the latest effort by the Biden administration to combat fees it says pose an unnecessary burden on American consumers, particularly those living paycheck to paycheck.
The change could potentially eliminate billions of dollars in fee revenue for the nation’s biggest banks, which were gearing up for a battle even before Wednesday’s announcement. Exactly how much revenue depends on which version of the new regulation is adopted.
Banks charge a customer an overdraft fee if their bank account balance falls below zero. Overdraft started as a courtesy offered to some customers when paper checks used to take days to clear, but proliferated thanks to the growing popularity of debit cards.
I dropped Wells Fargo after they re-ordered my pending payments to maximize overdraft fees.
I’d actually overdrawn like 25 bucks after making a couple 3-5 dollar purchases followed by $50 purchase. They moved the big payment up front so each of those little payments incured a 30 dollar fee.
Fuck them.
This, never do business with Wells Fargo.
I had that happen too with BoA, a long time ago. My initial reaction was “how in the fuck is this legal?!”
Then I nearly blacked out as a torrent of un-forgotten media, of all the jokes, comedic hate, and disparaging sentiment towards banks, flooded back to my minds eye.
Sadly, my only answer to this problem was “make more money”, which really isn’t an answer at all. Later, I switched to a credit union, which I would have done earlier had I known that was an option.
Pretty sure this was (is?) standard practice for every major bank, bc Citizens did the same thing to me. With no regulation, why wouldn’t a bank fuck its most vulnerable customers as hard as possible?
Exactly. What’s worse is that it’s almost justifiable if you consider how a bank makes money: float. If a huge swath of your account holders are maintaining as close to a $0 balance as possible, they’re costing you money to manage all the related overhead. I say “almost” because if they, oh I don’t know, made savings accounts attractive for small timers (say 4% interest on balances below $200), it might not require a collections department to gather forcibly extracted fictitious income.
I worked as a banker there in the early 2000s and those OD fees was brutal. I remembered when it went from $24 to $35 and how much it completely devastated people’s lives.
Right before I quit, ANYONE with an OD fee that I saw, I just reversed it without question. Then I got in trouble for reversing thousands of dollars before I was written up. I put in my 2 weeks after and in those 2 weeks kept on reversing charges.
I would tell people to not bank here when I worked there unless you have at LEAST 25k cash or investments or a mortgage over 250k. Otherwise, you’re going get FUCKED by fees.
Yeah, I remember when they hosted this whole festival in my town giving away free hotdogs and just going way over the top…
The fact that this was like a week after Wells Fargo was officially banned from doing business in California and really needed a good PR win likely had NOTHING to do with it… rolls eyes
My sister has an almost identical story with that bank.
Had U.S. Bank do that to me when I was a high-schooler on my first job. Time stamps on the transactions came in pending - next morning I had 2 overdrafts and fees to go with them. Cleared that account out the next day after getting them to waive the fees.
I’ve heard of shit like this, and not just from banks. A friend of mine had his insurance drop him without telling him, solely so they could send him a notice about it in the hopes that he’d renew and have to pay extra in “Coverage Gap” fees…
This shit needs to be illegal.