The Snakepit of American Banking

Amanda Marcotte makes a good case on Pandagon that banks are even worse than you thought. No matter how bad you think they are—they're worse. Having worked for a bank in Texas, she gives some detailed explication of the tricks they use to screw over the working poor. I'm very familiar with some of these—I can't tell you how many times I've had to pay multiple charges of $35 to Bank of America because I overdrew my account by one or two dollars.

Clipped from: pandagon.net by clp.ly

The worst parts of my job were 75% due to people who kept average account balances below $500. Those were the people who overdrew their checking accounts all the time, and then came in sobbing and begging for relief from what was often hundreds of dollars in overdraft fees. To make it worse, the bank’s official policy (this is standard) was to clear debits from highest to lowest amount. In other words, if processing had a rent check of $400 and then fifteen debit card transactions of $5-$10, they took the $400 first, and then the rest. So if the $400 overdrew the account, then every single transaction after was an overdraft fee.

From pandagon.net via clp.ly