B*A
The company I work for has a business account at a huge, greedy, obnoxious and litigous bank which, out of deference to their vampirical legal staff, I shall henceforth refer to as B*A. So when I get a check every other Monday afternoon from our accounting department, it is drawn on an account at B*A. Now if you are married, you probably know that it's a good idea to have separate checking accounts for you and your spouse instead of one joint checking account; that way you can keep track of your balances and you avoid overdrafts. My checking account is at an excellent local credit union, my wife's account, alas, is at B*A.

What I used to do on payday, that is Monday, is take my paycheck down to the nearest branch office of B*A and deposit it in my wife's checking account, taking out some cash. I would then go to the credit union and deposit that cash in my checking account. Sounds pretty foolproof, right? Here's how that worked out. I'd deposit a check drawn on a B*A account on Monday afternoon. My wife would go to the grocery store on Thursday night and pay for groceries with a paper check. And the check would promptly bounce; B*A consistently would not credit her account with a deposit drawn from a B*A business account until Friday morning, whereas they'd debit her account for a paper check written to a grocery store within minutes of her handing it to the checkout girl. So she'd end up paying a $35 overdraft fee to B*A, plus a $25 bad-check fee to the grocery store.

I could sort of understand the delay in crediting her account if the paycheck were drawn on an account at a different bank; they would presumably be waiting to see if this check actually cleared before adding it to the account. But I couldn't understand why it would take B*A four days to verify that a check drawn on a B*A account was good. Since the source account was in their own computer, it seems to me it should have taken no more than four seconds. But whatever. So I moved to Plan B. Instead of going to her bank first, I'd go to my credit union first, deposit the check, take out a few hundred in U.S. currency, and take those few hundred dollars over to the B*A for deposit. (Incidentally, whenever I deposited a paycheck at the credit union, the entire amount was available immediately. Yay credit union!) Guess what. When I deposited cash on Monday night, they still didn't credit her account until Friday. I guess they had to make sure those twenty-dollar bills didn't bounce.
(wkiernan, Mon 20 Jul 2009, 16:46, 1 reply)

That's exactly
why I bank with WAMU. BofA are fuckign useless.
( Batshitmentalist is sane for once, Mon 20 Jul 2009, 19:24, closed)