I'm going to make this as brief as possible, since I have a bad habit of providing too many details.
- Balance in my account on 7/13 according to the BB&T online banking website is $156.45. I knew I had a $75 credit card payment and a $1.22 debit transaction pending.
- Evening of 7/13, I purchased 36.85 in groceries, using my debit card.
- At midnight, the $75 and $1.22 posted, along with a $50 charge I hadn't expected. The $50 is a long story of a missing transaction from months before that I thought had been cancelled. BB&T charged two $35 overdraft fees for the $50 and the $1.22 transactions. All transactions appear in online banking with a date of 7/13.
-The next day, 7/14, the $36.85 charge posted, causing another $35 overdraft.
- This left my balance at $-111.64, $105 of which is in fees. This doesn't add up.
- By my mathwork, even with the $50 erroneous charge, I didn't go under a zero balance until the $36.85 posted on 7/14. Before that transaction, I had $31.43 available.
-So I go to the bank, where I'm told that the $50 and the $1.22 overdrafted because the funds weren't available due to the $36.85 transaction, which was being "held."
-Okay, I guess I can buy that. Then why was I charged another $35 when the $36.85 posted? It was the overdrafts which caused me to be in a negative balance. The overdrafts were caused by the $36.85, which at the time, was a valid charge. Going below a negative balance should be linear, not a cycle.
-Summary: Bank is charging overdraft fees based on both your current balance, and your available balance. This works to their advantage, since they can essentially charge you twice for the same charge. If you're going to say the $36.85 caused me to overdraft on Monday, how can you assess another overdraft charge when it posts on Tuesday? If you're going to use the argument that the funds weren't available on Monday at midnight BECAUSE of the $36.85, then only the first two overdraft fees would be legitimate.
-Banks try to tell you that they allow a transaction to go through out of courtesy, because declining it would be embarrasing, and overdraft fees are the cost of this courtesy. But they don't give you a choice to decline the charge instead of incurring the cost, which most people would prefer. And in this situation, there's no courtesy about it— they had already taken $36.85 from my available balance for the transaction on Monday when it was made. There wasn't a way for them to "decline" it after that point, so why should I have to pay a fee when they POST the transaction?
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