Where to begin... Compass Bank's policiy is definitely to *charge* as much as possible before they admit there is anything to put *into* an account. We learned this the hard way, and eventually would *cash* our paychecks and deposit the cash, rather than waiting up to *two weeks* for the checks to clear. A paycheck bounced once and it was almost a *month* before we found out (as the funds were "available" for a couple weeks, we had plenty of charges, which our employer actually reimbursed us for).
What finally ended our relationship with these people is this: we felt that someone had gotten hold of our account info. Naturally, we went down to close the suspect account and open a new one. The lady told us that there were two items pending in such-and-such amounts. On her advice, we left the money to cover those items in the old account. As this was near the end of the month (the 24th or so), I also asked her about our car insurance, which was on automatic debit, and she said the account would be closed well before the debit would go through on the first.
Ha. One of the items the lady told us was pending had, in fact, already gone through at some earlier date. So there was money left in the *still open* (which we thought was closed) account on the first of the month (a *week* later) when the car insurance hit. I had tried to stop the car insurance anyway, the previous week, but they said it was already in their system, and I could take care of it when it bounced off the (supposedly) closed account.
So we discovered all this two and a half weeks later, when Compass (without telling us) charged us the overdrafted amount from the car insurance (which didn't bother me), *along with* over $200 in overdraft fees. I tried and tried to get just the fees refunded, but they refused to do that, as they did not believe they were at fault, even though we acted on information given to us by the lady who closed the account. We even went down to the branch to use their special channels to get to customer service. When we were at the branch, the lady who had "helped" us change the account claimed to have no reccollection of anything she had said, and in fact denied that she would have said anything like it.
So, in sum. Screw Compass. We're now very happy with Washington Mutual.
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