Why not spend the money? Let’s see how this will play out:
- I spend the money.
- Bank of America realizes the error.
- Bank of America later withdraws $3,100 from my account.
- Bank of America slaps me with an overdraft fee.
Why not spend the money? Let’s see how this will play out:
When I went into the banking center, I spent two hours of my life sitting across the table from a rep while he made the changes. Not only did I lose two hours of my life, but didn’t do the address change on two of my accounts and for one account, he changed the account address but not the debit card address, making the debit card completely unusable.
Now, I have two business Visa credit cards – one for each of my businesses. Each one individually takes a while to spend $30,000, but combined, they get to $30,000 rather quickly. So, I routinely transfer my points from the business Visa cards to my personal Visa and then redeem the points for cash from my personal Visa. (Of course, since it’s Bank of America, they only let you transfer them in blocks of 2,500 points…how convenient for them.)
One day they decided to introduce an expiration date for transferred points, but failed to notify me. I went to redeem 35,000 points for $350. However, the Bank of America website crashed on me. I didn’t get a chance to try again until a few days later…the beginning of the next month. All of a sudden, I found 15,000 points (equivalent of $150) missing from my account. When I called them up, they told me, “Oh, they expired.”
After several days of phone calls, amounting to about 6 hours of my life wasted, they offered me a consolation of $120 for the expired points. Unfortunately they wouldn’t offer me the points back, which mean that the remaining 20,000 points could only be redeemed for $160.
Essentially, Bank of America cheated me out of $70 that was never theirs to begin with along with 6 hours of my life. If I tried to fight them on the issue, 10,000 more points were going to expire at the end of the next cycle.
And they wonder why I don’t like to use my Bank of America credit cards.
I told him, “Because I hate Bank of America!” (I thought about doing the evil laugh afterwards.)
I called up Bank of America and asked to add the service to my account. They told me they wanted $20 per account per month for the service. I currently have 9 accounts remaining with Bank of America. I was not going to spend $180 per month to save Bank of America money.
A few days later I received a phone call from a business lender. He had me run through the extensive process of applying for credit. I have an excellent credit score, cash in my account, am willing to put 20% down, mortgage the aircraft, personally co-signed for the business, and was considering using my house as collateral.
“We are not in the business of aircraft lending,” is what they told me.
“Then why the tell did you put me through this entire process to start with?!”
Banking Center Rep: How are you today Mr. Schapiro?
Me: Oh, you know, just another day, hating Bank of America.
Banking Center Rep: I’m sorry to hear that. Is there anything I can do?
Me: Please no, it will probably end up costing me more money or wasting more of my life when I try to get a hidden fee reversed.
It turns out that even though there were six drive-thru teller windows, there was only one teller working and of the two ATMs, only one of them worked.