I know exactly what Albert is talking about. BB&T does this to me, too. Let me tell you my story with BB&T. This is such a mess.
I started working at a place where I had to have direct deposit or get a paycard. I was told by some people that they were having problems with the paycards and that I should just go with direct deposit. I did not have a bank account at the time because I had just closed one out at a different bank and had not really been satisfied with them. I thought, "BB&T is about two minutes from my house. I'll go with them." So I went and signed up for BB&T.
The first day that I signed up, the lady told me that I would receive my checks within 7 to 10 business days and that the payment for them would be deducted from my account balance. I told her that was fine. She also gave me a sheet of paper containing what she said was my temporary user ID and password for the BB&T website. She said she was setting my account up online and that it would be ready within the evening.
So I came home and went online to change my password for my account. However, I was unable to get into it. I thought maybe she got busy and was unable to set up the account, so I figured I would try it later. That was in October. Three months shy of a year later, I am still trying to log into my account at www.bbt.com and am unable to do so. I have contacted them several times about it, and they kept saying they would fix it and they never did. I even clicked on "enroll now," thinking perhaps she just forgot to enroll me and I could do it myself. It will not let me, because it says the information I am entering is incorrect.
Well, I am 100% certain that I know my own SSN, PIN, and debit card number, as I have the first two committed to memory (and they work for everything else), and the third I am staring at. So apparently my information was incorrectly entered into the system by whoever set the checking account up.
Now, on to the second problem. As I mentioned, they said that they would send my checks within 7 to 10 business days. I waited and waited. No checks. I kept waiting. Still no checks. I called them. "Looks like we forgot to order them," they said. They said they would have them sent right to me. I waited 10 business days. No checks. I called again. No checks. I went back and talked to one of the tellers and explained to her that they had been giving me the runaround over my checks for months. I did not get checks until probably around January, and it was a miracle that I got them then. They finally had the sense to order them for me. I do not know what was so hard about it in the first place.
The third problem was that a while back I lost my bank statement that was sent to me in the mail. Since I am obviously not able to go online and look at my history, I went to BB&T and asked them if they could give me a printout of that time period. It was only about a week later than I had received it, but there were some things on there that would not be covered in the last thirty days that I needed to check out. The lady would not give me one because it would take "too long to look up." My mother worked at a bank before. I know that you can customize the dates and go back several months on an account. The lady was just lazy and did not want to help me.
And now we come to the biggest problem of all. BB&T absolutely loves to rip me off. They love taking my money, apparently, more than anything. This is how they do it. My check gets deposited. I check with them and am told that the funds are in the account and are available. I pay my bills. Mind you, I write checks to pay most of my bills, which I obviously do not do until my paycheck is deposited into my account (this happens every other Friday).
I mail the checks in. They each take a couple of days to get to their destinations. Then, as we all know, the businesses that receive them do not cash them the second they get them in their hands. I do not spend any other money on anything, because I usually have enough cash or can use my credit card to get gas for the car, and food of course.
The checks get cashed. I look at my bank statements, and what do we have? Overdraft fees, overdraft fees, overdraft fees galore. My account balance pretty much stays in the negative. They wait until businesses cash my checks and THEN they post my deposit. How they can get away with that, I will never know. If I take a deposit to the account, sometimes it takes days and days upon days to post to the account. Yet they tell me it is available to use when I ask them. I do not know what it is exactly that they are doing that makes this legal to do to someone.
I have looked over my bank statements time and again, and I am NOT spending money that I do not have. I even have to account for all of the overdraft fees that I get during the month. That means I will be $200 in the negative (which is funny, because I do not have overdraft protection and they are NOT supposed to be paying things out on my account if it will put me in the negative) and get paid $600. Then I only have $400 with which to pay bills and whatnot. I take those things into consideration. It is not like I try to spend the whole $600 if my bank takes $200 of it.
I have even had occasions where my car insurance, which is deducted from my account automatically every month, was taken out on one certain day, as stated by the insurance company, but the bank states that it was taken out on a different day. For example, say I got my pay deposited on the 17th and my car insurance was taken out of the account on the 20th. The bank has come back and said that it was taken out on the 16th. I will call and listen to the transactions and hear certain things, and then I will call a couple of days later and there are things inserted in there before things that I have already heard. For example, say I had called them on the 16th and nothing had been posted for that day. Say I called back on the 17th and it said I had a deposit of $500 and a balance of, say, $550.
Then let's say I called back on the 20th. It would tell me I had a balance of $402. Where did all the money go if I started out with $550 on the 17th and the car insurance company is swearing they did not take the money until today? Well, obviously I started out with a balance of $50. Then they take away my car insurance, which is $108 per month. That takes me into the negative. Then they add a $34 overdraft fee, which they love to do. Then the next day they add a $6 overdraft fee because they have their stupid $6/day rule. Then they re-add my $500 check, and that gives me $402. Look how much it cost me.
This sounds really stupid and impossible, but I am telling you, people, I have had this happen to me enough to know. I do not think it is just my account, either. I have met plenty of people who do their banking there, and for people who have lots of deposits monthly like me, most of them understand what I am talking about, about dates mysteriously changing and that sort of thing.
All I am saying is I know it sounds stupid, but I am not so dumb that I cannot do math. I do not have good credit (due to separation and being left with bills I could not pay, which were charged off - not something I wanted, but it happened), and I cannot get an account anywhere else. I have to use the account that I have now or not have a bank account, because no one else will let me sign up for one. So it is not that I stay with BB&T because I love them. It is because I do not have any way of getting a paycheck if I do not. Those paycards are no good, and everyone says they do not work half of the time. Some people might like BB&T, but I, on the other hand, am pretty sure I never will. If I had $1 million in there, I am sure they would find a way to put me in the negative.
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