The trouble here, like in many other stories, starts with an overdraft fee.
But, unlike so many of the other stories, I'll be the first to admit that the initial overdraft fee was indeed my own fault.
You may want to get a drink and a blanket and settle in, because this story is going to take a while to tell.
My husband and I were moving into a new apartment complex. Our new landlord told us to give him the check "whenever," but we gave it to him the Thursday that we signed the lease, because we were both getting paid over the weekend (my husband on Friday morning, and I got paid in cash on Sunday) and knew we would have the amount in the bank by the next day.
We were wrong to "float" a check like that, but we'd had to do it before at our previous rental home, as the old rental had strict due dates and sometimes took over a week to cash the checks anyhow. What we did not realize was that our new landlord stops to deposit every day. That is where we made the mistake.
Naturally, the check ended up clearing quicker than ever before. It cleared the next day, before my husband could put his paycheck (which would have covered the entire check we wrote) into the bank. Whoops. We knew we had overdrafted when the debit card was not accepted for an amount less than $10 at the grocery store that night.
We panicked when we saw our account in the red, but figured we would just deposit our money, bring the balance back up, and pay the fee. After all, we brought it on ourselves; that was a gamble we chose to take when we wrote the check to the landlord in the first place.
After work on Friday, my husband and I went to the ATM to deposit the pay. Keep in mind, this was around 7 pm, so of course the bank itself was completely closed, and there was not a soul except for us in the drive-thru. My husband put in his card, entered his PIN, and navigated the menu to select the "deposit" option. He took the envelope from me and noticed I had forgotten to write some information on the envelope.
He searched for a pen to fill out the information I had missed, then turned back around to the ATM only to find it back at the main screen. Confused and unsure of what had happened, we used my copy of the card to attempt another deposit. Again, it accepted the card, asked for a PIN, and allowed my husband to navigate to the "Deposit" menu. And here is where we saw what we had missed before.
After entering the correct PIN and navigating through the menu, it decided to tell us that the use of that particular card was "unauthorized," and the ATM kept the card. So now we had no way of depositing the money. We had a second checking account linked to the first, but we did not want to chance losing those ATM cards too. So we decided we would wait until Monday and go personally to the bank to deposit the paycheck.
Monday came, and my husband went into the bank and explained to the teller what had happened. She sympathized, deposited the money into the account, and told him that all should be well. We could continue using the account. Since the ATM ate our cards, we would need a new card mailed to us. (We had a third spare, just "in case," but it was our last card, so of course we wanted another card mailed to us! On a side note, I don't believe we ever did receive that replacement card...) However, our third backup card should still work, the employee said. And we went on our way, all fine and dandy.
The next pay period came, and my husband went out on his lunch break to deposit his check so it would be credited to our account earlier. He put in the card for the account we had just overdrafted on, and then decided better of it. He would just put the money in our second account instead. So he hit the "Cancel" button without entering a PIN and got the "unauthorized transaction" screen again. And, of course, the ATM kept his card. Frustrated, he went into the bank, which was open since he got there during lunch, and talked to a teller.
Once again, he was told that things "should be" fixed now. After a brief argument with a supervisor, who claimed that there "is no cancel option on the ATM" and told my husband that the machine "ate his card because you're not supposed to hit cancel," he finally got his card back. (Note: the ATM says on its PIN screen, "If there is an error, please select 'Cancel.'" Inserting the wrong card would be an error, wouldn't it? Also, wasn't it strange that the first time this happened we were told we would have to have new cards mailed to us, but now, suddenly, the supervisor could retrieve the card with no problem?)
Thinking that things were fixed, he left the bank, frustrated but satisfied that things were "okay" now.
Jump ahead another week. By this time, my husband and I had had so much trouble with the first account that we decided to stop using it, except for bills we pay online that are already linked to that account. We decided it would be a better idea to keep separate accounts anyhow; this way, we can keep our bill-specific budgeted money in one account and the leftovers (groceries, gas, random spending, etc.) in another account. We figured that if we kept a small amount of extra money in the first account and transferred only what we needed to pay our bills, we should not have problems with overdrafts on that account.
That would be too simple. Leave it to BB&T to mess up even that.
I checked the bank account online in the morning, as I always do. (I guess I am paranoid lately; I like to know that things are in order. I keep a very close watch on our finances.) There was our account, the one now designated to only pay bills, and it was... in the red? How could that be? We had enough for bills, plus an extra $5 on top of that, and there was no reason we should have been overdrafted. Yet there it was, plain and simple: the overdraft fee had already been taken out of our account.
Here is where simple logic just cannot explain why our account was in the red.
We had a bill that we paid online. Let's say that the amount was $66.45. This means that we had $71.45 in the account. The morning I checked the account and found it in the red, the bill had been deducted, which should have left the account at $5. Instead, our "current balance" read -$29. Our "available balance" (which shows pending transactions that have yet to clear) read -$95.45.
What did not make sense was the fact that we had no pending transactions. (At least, not any authorized transactions; we've had unauthorized transactions occur before, but that's another story for another company.) The bill we had just paid had been deducted, and the overdraft fee also showed as having been deducted. What also did not make sense is that when we "overdrafted," we were left with a balance of -$29. BB&T's overdraft fee is $34, so it would only make sense that, had we actually overdrafted our account, our balance should have read -$34 or more.
My husband called our local BB&T branch to try to find out who had a hold on our account, and why a hold (and not an actual cleared transaction) would have overdrafted our account. (Furthermore, why did they clear an overdraft fee before clearing whatever was being held? Wouldn't it make more sense that we would be overdrafted if the money was actually taken from the account?)
Before we were married and I started keeping track, my husband would call BB&T if he could not remember a certain transaction that was still being held and had not yet cleared. So he called BB&T to find this information out, since, like I said, we had nothing else authorized to be paid and so should not have any holds, but they "could not" tell him what the hold was for.
It was at this point that I realized that the amount of the hold was the same amount as the bill that had just cleared from our account: BB&T was holding $66.45. I mentioned this to my husband, who then mentioned it to the woman assisting him on the line. She said that the company we had just paid most likely had a second hold and might end up taking money from our account. She suggested we call them and tell them to stop processing this "payment."
My husband called the company and talked with a customer service assistant there. They acknowledged that, on occasion, things like this did happen. However, their records showed no indication that they had a payment pending for our account with them, and that our prior payment had already been cleared. They suggested we contact the bank again, just to be 100% certain that they (the company) were at fault; if they were indeed at fault, they would be happy to refund the money.
So my husband called BB&T back. The woman he talked to before (who gave him her direct phone number) did not answer her phone on multiple occasions, nor did she return the call after he left a message on her voice mail. He ended up calling back a couple of hours later and talking with someone else, trying to sort this all out. After all, when it is a matter of nearly $100, it is not something to just brush off, especially not when they are taking money without reason.
He relayed the information that the company he had called did not show any pending transactions from our account. BB&T then told him the most absurd excuse I have ever heard: apparently, the woman admitted, if they so choose, BB&T can hold money for the amount of a pending transaction for up to seven days after it has actually cleared your account.
The "logic" here is astounding. They expect us to believe that we need to have double the amount of any and all pending transactions in the account at any given time? If we were millionaires, maybe. If we were college students still living off of our parents, sure. But twenty-something hourly-wage workers just are not able to keep double all amounts in their checking accounts at all times; sometimes it is going to hover around zero. And never, I repeat, never, before has BB&T held a transaction for even half a day after payment had already cleared.
My husband was told that this bit about being able to hold the amount for up to a week after the fact was in our terms of agreement. (For one thing, if that were in our terms of agreement, we never would have agreed!) She suggested that perhaps it came with a statement, but she insisted that it was there.
The only "logical" reason I can find for this to be the case is that we made a mistake in overdrafting, resulting in the bank having to front over $100 on our behalf. I can see why they might change our terms of service because of that. However, we never received any kind of terms that said that they would hold money after it had cleared, nor did we receive any kind of revised terms of service after the overdraft.
The excuse that "we just moved" could not be used; postal forwarding has been in effect the entire time, and we received both the overdraft notice and a statement from the bank since this all occurred, but no terms of agreement. Last time I checked, we need to be notified when changes of this caliber are made to our account.
Finally, the whole hairy mess got sorted out: BB&T refunded the overdraft fee (something they initially claimed they "can't" do) and released the hold. Since then, the only trouble we've had with that particular account is that the debit card still won't work. Otherwise, we simply don't touch it. Not even with a ten-foot pole.
Because of all of this, my husband and I are switching to a new bank tomorrow, now that our money is actually sorted out and back where it should be: with us. BB&T has been nothing but irresponsible, sloppy, and unprofessional. Our experience with them had been bad before; after this entire episode, we're through with them. We've had it with their frustrating phone support (hence why we called the actual branch this time around, which did not prove to be any more of a help), and their online banking makes me paranoid. (The online banking numbers shift on their own during certain hours. I remember a panicked call to the 24-hour phone support because we had money missing that didn't add up with the receipts we saved, and it was a rather large outstanding amount. The girl on phone support explained that "the numbers jumble themselves in the computer system from 10pm until 6am, so your account won't be correct during those hours.") It seems a little scary that, during certain hours, your account may reflect random changes that don't actually have anything to do with your account. Shouldn't they be a little more responsible than that?
In addition, it is not professional at all to pass the blame on to someone else, in this case when the woman told us it was probably the company that had billed us that was maintaining a hold, or to make up excuses, like the second woman, who immediately stated that they "had the right" to hold our money, without telling us that they would and without any kind of prior notice. Previously, we had only had minor but usual annoyances with BB&T. After this incident, we won't let the door hit us on the way out; we won't be dealing with BB&T ever again.
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