The evil of banks.
My prior landlord chose to sit on a check for four months, and my somewhat less than organized accounting system let it fall off my radar. When deposited, it drew my account negative, and as a result, I got charged two overdraft fees.
These fees.. $34 each.. were for moving bits around in a register.
I’m sorry, but I feel like I’m being taken advantage of here. $34? I could understand $10, but $34? What if I were paid minimum wage? That’d be like five hours of work.. for something that a computer did automatically.
Face it – capitolism is a tool for the evil side of the fence, not the good one.
May 14th, 2007 at 5:36 pm
Capitalism is the maximization of profit in any transaction, regardless of what it does to the people involved. I dated a woman with Very Bad Credit and learned a lot about how the US financial system keeps people in debt and the enormous, unbelievable amounts of money it extracts from them in just this way: little late fees and the like.
May 14th, 2007 at 8:22 pm
i’ve gotten horribly hosed on overdraft charges before.
it made me extremely angry.
i think it’s $29 at my bank, and i’ve had times where a check coming in is just a day or two behind shit going out, and if you use your debit card for lots of stupid little purchases, you get dinged every single time. then you look back at that four dollar taco you bought that ended up costing you thirty three dollars, and the cd that ended up costing almost fifty, and you want to puke. all over the wamu board of directors.
May 14th, 2007 at 9:57 pm
For my bank, it’s something like $66 each day that it’s overdrafted. If it was just me using the account, it would never be overdrafted.
May 14th, 2007 at 10:01 pm
Well,
1) Congradulations for having either achived mental perfection or learned to use a computer to replace the sadly failing human memory. 😉
2) I will say that none of my banks are *that* bad.
3) I didn’t know you still read me. Hi. 😉
S.
May 17th, 2007 at 2:40 pm
Wow. I think 6 months is the maximum amount of time one can wait to cash or deposit a check based on the Uniform Commercial Code.
I still have an outstanding check of $300 from almost 2 years ago, and I called the guy twice about it and he never called me back.
Guess he doesn’t need the money!
November 1st, 2007 at 7:14 am
Don’t spend money you don’t have. If you’re already in debt, there’s no need to ride the actual cash balance right at $0, because you’ll be in debt either way. Keep SOME liquid cash, even if it means having a higher debt. I say this because I’ve never balanced a checkbook in my life or carried a credit card balance. Easier said than done, but it is indeed more possible than most americans act like. They have to have their overpriced cellphones, iPods, movie tickets, and restaurant meals (4 things I don’t buy/have!), when they don’t truly need them.
November 1st, 2007 at 7:27 am
My next-door neighbors gave me a paycheck they’d kept in their house for 4 years when it was misdelivered. WTF! It was my last paycheck before not working for 2.5 yrs, was $1,200, and I could have used the money. But my company, Cornell, didn’t exist anymore, and had been sold to Hudson-Hyatt or some such nonsense. When I called them for the money, they said that section had been sold to Monster. When you buy something, you buy its debt, but like hell were Monster.com’s lawyers just going to hand me $1,200…
November 1st, 2007 at 10:49 am
Until my car accident and subsquetent events – in 2005 – I hadn’t ever been in debt either. And, my current debt is about 1/3rd of what it was in 2006. I’m not going to give up everything that makes me happy just to get out of debt faster, but I am paying off my debts at a fairly aggressive rate.
November 2nd, 2007 at 5:58 am
Sounds like you’re doing better in paying off debt than 99% of people in debt!! 🙂