TOO BIG TO SUCCEED

[Rob Moitoza]

I’m sure you recall the big banks all adamantly stating that they couldn’t get the best personnel for their banks without paying out the huge salaries and bonuses.

Well, here are two experiences I have had with Bank of America over the last four months to challenge their assertions.

A couple of weeks ago my niece came home to her duplex to find a foreclosure notice on her door. It turned out that even though she and her husband had been diligently making payments to her father each month… he had let the mortgage on the duplex, which he and my sister owned, lapse. My sister, now divorced, was livid, and my neice was in tears. This was his own daughter he had let this lapse on. So, my niece and her husband checked and found out they would qualify for a loan to take the place over if they could come up with the money quick enough to stop the foreclosure. That amount was nearly $30,000. None of them could get that amount in time. So, I agreed to take it out of my line of credit as long as it was taken out of her dad’s name and put into theirs.

Here’s where it gets interesting. Bank of America Home Loans was adamant that we overnight them a certfied check for the full amount in order to stop the foreclosure. I also have my own account at Bank of America, so, I went to my local branch, got a Bank of America cashiers check for the full amount, and overnight express mailed the package off to the address we were given by two different Bank of America officials. Next day the check had not been posted. Second day the check had not been posted. Third day… still nothing. So, my niece, noticing that the paperwork they had sent her had a different address on it, called Bank of America. Of course, she couldn’t get a real person on the line. Finally, after much hassle she got through to someone who told her that it wasn’t the right address… even though that was the address they, themselves, gave us! She said it would eventually get to the right office, but by now we were only a few days away from the foreclosure going through. So, they asked us to send a copy of the check receipt, express mail receipt, etc.!

Monday it still hadn’t been resolved so I went to my local Bank of America and asked a “personal banker” there to check on it for me. She found out the “check had been cashed”. So, who cashed it? We finally tracked it down after talking to several different departments. Here is what happened. Even though I wrote the account number clearly on the check and a cover letter telling them to credit it to that account, someone at Bank of America crossed off the number on the check and wrote my house loan number on it. They credited it back tio MY account! After another round of verifications it was finally credited to the right account. Does this sound like a bank that is too big to fail, or a bank that is just too damned big, period! And too stupid at that!

Here is story number two:

At the end of December my work situation had been spotty and I was scrambling to come up with my January house payment. I had paid the mortgage on time to Bank of America every month for nearly ten years… the latest refinance being about five years ago. Realizing I was getting close to the first of the month, I went down to my local branch and made the payment by check directly to the teller at the bank. A couple of weeks later I got a call from Bank of America Home loans asking me where the January payment was. I told them I paid by check at the bank on December 28. They said they never received it! I was then told that all of the loan numbers had been changed that month. To make matters worse, the teller had entered in one wrong number on the loan account! There was no such account, but somehow the check was still accepted by Bank of America! It had basically disappeared into the ether! So, I got a “personal banker” from my local branch on the case. She called and called and had the same problem getting through to a real person… even though it was her own bank! Eventually she got though and was told that we had to FAX copies of the check and all the info we had. Fortunately, I had paid by check, rather than the electronic transfer that they are always trying to talk us into… otherwise I would have had no proof of the transaction and may have never resolved it!

So, now the phone calls started! Every night Bank of America Home loans would call and ask me where the January payment was. It had only been about three weeks… yet they felt compelled to harrass me, even though I had been a “valued customer” for all these years. I went back to my local officer. She again called the loan office and they now told her it was in the “Payment Resolution” department. So, I said, “Great! Then, can they please stop with the phone calls?” Guess what they told me? “That’s a different department! We have no control over the calls and can’t stop them.” So, in other words, one department of Bank of America has no way to communicate with another department in their own damned company! This is what our “bailout” and big bonuses are paying for!

By this time, we were almost at the end of January and the issue had still not been resolved. I went back to my local officer again. She sent another copy of all the paperwork… plus a lot of other forms they were requiring her to fill out. She now had many hours into this thing. I told her that if it didn’t get resolved by the end of the month that I wasn’t going to make the February payment. She advised me to make it anyway. Of course, exactly what I suspected happened. They credited my February payment to January! Now, they were telling me I was late on my February payment! Well, after about another three weeks the issue was finally resolved, the late fees stricken and I was okay.

But, here’s the deal, if this bank can’t even keep track of its own departments and give people the right addresses or a real person to talk to, then, bottom line is this, they are not “Too big to fail”. They are “Too big to succeed”. I’d advise everybody to get their money the Hell out of these big banks and go to the little local guys who maybe still care about their customers.

By the way, I have friends making minimum wage who could most certainly do a better job than this. So, this malarky about needing the big bonuses to get the best people is absolute bull. I was terrible in math, but I guarantee I could do a better job myself. How hard can it possibly be to coordinate your own offices? If you can’t do that you’re “too big to succeed”!

Rob Moitoza

West Seattle

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[JoB]

Rob..

check your credit report.

You probably have to get a late payment notification removed.

let’s just say.. been there done that with that bank. i paid on time over the phone and the authorization cleared my bank the same day, but the clerk who took my payment over the phone keyed in a wrong number on the account:(

it took me 6 months to get that one cleared… and in the meantime i paid an extra payment to stop the harassing phone calls.

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[JoB]

it isn’t only banks…

i paid my target bill on the due date at the local target and got a call the next day asking for my payment. it turns out the store doesn’t process payments till the following day…

you would think that if they knew their stores didn’t process payments till the next day they would wait to call you till the 2nd day for a “late” payment.. but no.

I no longer do business with them.

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[Sue]

If customer service/incompetence alone were a deciding factor for being in business, many, MANY businesses would go under. Unfortunately, things don’t work like this (although I am sorry for your involvent in their apparent incompetence).

I work with banking lawyers, and have watched as a number of our client banks have now been shut down by the FDIC or under warning that they could be shortly. The reality is that the banks failing has to do with undercapitalization (which you can read more about at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undercapitalization#Banking_industry ) – the more money you have to secure your risks, the less likely you will fail. And the big banks have lots of power and volume and money, so they do not go below those ratios, putting them at risk. The smaller, local banks, being smaller, have less volume/customers/money and just can’t recover. So if you are going to move money to a smaller bank, it would be prudent to do some research into whether they’ve received any FDIC or DFI (Department of Financial Institutions) orders/warnings against them to fix their situation or risk being closed.

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[JoB]

a timely warning for me as i am moving my bank of america account…

when they started charging me $10 a month to keep a modest mad money balance with them they lost me.

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[JanS]

is it any wonder we feel this animosity about banks? Here’s Peggy Noonan on the Financial Industry Inquiry Commission hearings:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304198004575172251738485686.html

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[Bonnie]

Not BoA but 10 years ago when we bought our house we paid our property taxes in with our mortgage. Pretty normal, right? Well, about 9 months go by. We’re paying our property taxes every single month to our mortage company. What happens? We get a notice from King County telling us we haven’t paid our Property Taxes and listed all the late fees, etc.! OMG! We’d been paying them all along.

So we call the mortgage company. They tell us to fax it to them. We fax it. A few days go by. Nothing. We call again. They say they didn’t get a fax. We fax again. Nothing.

We’re transferred all over the place. Nobody can help us. We have statements saying we paid the taxes in our mortgage!

Then, get this…about 3 weeks into this process of trying to figure this out I check the mail and there is a check for over $5,000 from our mortgage company with a letter saying we OVERPAID!

Excuse me? That was for our taxes! So we get on the phone again. What do they tell us? Sign the back and mail it back to them! No way! There is no way I’m trusting them with that check!

We cash the check and pay the taxes plus fees. It took another 6 months for the mortgage company to pay us our fees back. We finally refinanced and now we pay our taxes on our own!

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[JayDee]

I switched to BECU precisely because BofA regarded customers as sheep to be sheared, not because they actually cared for my business. I asked the local branch to stop other parts of BofA from calling me 2-3 times a week to solicit business from me (Of course I had to look the 1-888 number on the internet to know this as they didn’t list a BofA name on Caller ID). Sure, no problem. The calls continued. I have $$$$ in my savings, but my checking runs low due to a switch in an automatic withdrawal. I unknowingly bounce 5 transactions. $125. “Oh, you need our BofA credit card linked to your account to prevent an overdraft…” despite the fact that my “linked” savings had plenty of money. And yes, I told them this at the time.

–

So I am a new BECU member and like it (except for the soon-to-be-gone Safeway ATM, and the fact there isn’t a Trader Joes going in there).

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[westcoastdeb]

Now for my turn — but its not about BOA’s thousands of departments.

I banked with them all through high school, when I had a part time job and not too much money in the bank. Around rolls payday. I head down to the bank and have them deposit my check, but I make sure to tell them to deposit it as cash. Several times. This was a Friday, and 4th of July weekend. I spend my money like usual on the weekend, a few dollars here and there. Come Tuesday (the next day the bank was open) I am overdrawn by like $300. Why? The teller I delt with did not deposit the check as cash, so i had 5 or 6 overdraft fees. I was livid, but BOA refused to do anything to help me out — not reduce my fees or cancel them altogether or anything else. I gave up and quit banking with them.

Fast forward to 3 years ago. I decided to give them another shot. While they have been decent this time around, I get tired of being told one thing on the phone and another in person. I had a personal banker tell me I would be credited 35 dollars for making 3 billpayer transactions out of my new account (which I was setting up as a bill only account, so this sounded great!), and then when I never recieved the credit was told that it was not available to customers who already had an account, even if it was a new one. I have also been told over the phone that all I had to do to get x, y or z service was to go into the local branch and they would help me out. I go into the branch and they dont know how to do the service.

last complaint, then off my soapbox. I have NEVER had a BOA card come in the mail on time when I requested it. It’s always longer than they say or they never mailed it or some other thing. Must wait 2 more weeks, they will have it mailed to the branch, etc. Even when I verify my address when I set it all up.

Deb

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[dawsonct]

Go local; banks, credit unions. Bring our money back to the state.

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[JSR]

I have my own story from Bank of America. They coded a $116 check I had deposited for $116,000, and when that check was naturally returned, they debited my account for that amount, overdrawing my account $110,000!!! They didn’t even discover the error until my checks started bouncing (at $35 a pop) and I had to call them to ask why. Was there an apology letter? NO.

One would think there would be mechanisms in place to draw attention to overdrafts of that magnitude! I mean, if I tried to charge $100,000 on my BA credit card, the red flags would start waving right away.

They don’t care; they don’t have to. that should be their motto.

And dawsonct, ITA. Our credit union is our primary bank. We love Waterfront Federal Credit Union!

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[JoB]

JSR…

yesterday i left Bank of America with cash after closing my account and went in search of the BeCu branch i thought was in Burien. It was a Watermark.

i didn’t stop because i didn’t know anything about that credit union. What group of depositors do they accept? And what do you like about them?

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[JSR]

JoB: congratulations! I don’t know anything about Watermark. Ours is Waterfront, which is located in the business park across from the entrance to the steel mill. (down past AllStar Fitness) Waterfront FCU, takes, I believe, workers in the marine industry and some other union workers. See who can join: http://www.waterfrontfcu.com/about/who.asp

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[Sue]

JoB, I don’t know about that credit union, but if you’re looking for a BECU near you, there’s one in the Safeway on Roxbury.

If you do want to join Watermark, here’s their eligibility page: https://www.watermarkcu.org/html/join.htm – if you live in Washington, you’re eligible (same as BECU).

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[JoB]

Sue..

how do i figure out which credit union is a better risk?

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[Sue]

JoB, you can go to http://www.dfi.wa.gov/consumers/deposits.htm (this is the WA Dept. of Financial Institutions) and scroll down to “Financial Health of your Bank or Credit Union” and check out the links on how to find info. (When searching, keep in mind that BECU is actually “Boeing Employees Credit Union”.) Also take a look at the 2009 Annual Report which you will find on each credit union’s website.

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[JoB]

thanks

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[Author]

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