101–110 of 223 posts
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There are a couple of times in my life when I was quite poor (for someone living in a G8 country...) The biggest thing I learned was to use cash. Cash is awesome because you can see how much you have and you can't spend more than you have. Even now that I am relatively well off, I have my habitual routine of getting cash at the beginning of the week and spending only that for the week. In fact, I make sure that there…
Civil forfeiture laws in the US. I don't feel safe carrying a reasonable amount of cash. Here the police can just rob me, and now I'm guilty until proven innocent. In DC it costs up to $2500 for the right to challenge a police seizure in court, it's complex, expensive and it can take years.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are a couple of times in my life when I was quite poor (for someone living in a G8 country...) The biggest thing I learned was to use cash. Cash is awesome because you can see how much you have and you can't spend more than you have. Even now that I am relatively well off, I have my habitual routine of getting cash at the beginning of the week and spending only that for the week. In fact, I make sure that there…
Civil forfeiture laws in the US. I don't feel safe carrying a reasonable amount of cash. Here the police can just rob me, and now I'm guilty until proven innocent. In DC it costs up to $2500 for the right to challenge a police seizure in court, it's complex, expensive and it can take years.
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> They know exactly what they're doing. They're rich bankers robbing poor people. I can understand thinking that the "correct" thing to do here is to simply not allow a transaction when there aren't sufficient funds, but this language goes overboard. It's not robbing a person because they were unable to keep track of how much money they own and adjust accordingly.
Large banks will do things like structure charges so as to extract the maximum amount of overdraft charges. For example: You have $40 in your account. You spend $20, then $12, then $5, then $120. One would logically conclude that at the end of the day, the bank will resolve these *in order* and you will have a single overdraft fee. Large banks *cough* Bank of America *cough* will explicitly structure those charges to…
Essentially, a poor person will be charged higher fees than a rich person.
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> They know exactly what they're doing. They're rich bankers robbing poor people. I can understand thinking that the "correct" thing to do here is to simply not allow a transaction when there aren't sufficient funds, but this language goes overboard. It's not robbing a person because they were unable to keep track of how much money they own and adjust accordingly.
Banks make keeping track of the money in your account intentionally difficult. You can't just check your balance and assume that you can spend what's there. Instead, your balance includes only processed transactions, whereas your account also has a list of pending transactions that can hit your balance at any time. Pending transactions can also disappear from your account, only to come back as a confirmed transaction…
They call it "maintenance". Like an account at $1995 needs some screws tightened or something. This isn't the 1920s. There isn't some clerk somewhere checking ledger sheets. It's all digital. It doesn't matter what value is in there. It's just a bit pattern.
In other "you have got to be fucking kidding me" moments, I once got charged a late payment fee on a loan that said I owed $0 that month because I had been making payments ahead for several months prior. Had a rainy day, needed some extra cash, figured since it said "you owe nothing this month" that meant I owed nothing that month. Apparently, buried deep in the promissory note, there is a term whereby I was required to pay a certain minimum every month, regardless of what the statement said.
They then used this as an excuse to jack up my interest rate. Aren't student loans grand?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They know exactly what they're doing. They're rich bankers robbing poor people. I can understand thinking that the "correct" thing to do here is to simply not allow a transaction when there aren't sufficient funds, but this language goes overboard. It's not robbing a person because they were unable to keep track of how much money they own and adjust accordingly.
Large banks will do things like structure charges so as to extract the maximum amount of overdraft charges. For example: You have $40 in your account. You spend $20, then $12, then $5, then $120. One would logically conclude that at the end of the day, the bank will resolve these *in order* and you will have a single overdraft fee. Large banks *cough* Bank of America *cough* will explicitly structure those charges to…
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The most egregious example that has happened to me: I had a checking account with a hidden $5 fee if the balance went below $5000 in a given month. I made a big purchase, left the account with about $3 in it and scheduled a transfer from savings for the next day... you know how it played out: $5 fee on the low balance, $50 charge to "borrow" the $2 all taken from the transfer the next day. They call that a "service".…
I had a similar fee for not having a transaction into my checking account for the month. I visited the branch to contest it. They waived the fee, and I asked the branch manager, "So I just need 'a deposit' each month, right? How about $0.01?" She didn't answer me, but I setup my ADP account at work the next day and BofA's been getting $0.01 into checking every month for years now. And you know what? I'm pretty sure i…
The pain overdraft fees cause poor people is truly hard to comprehend unless you've been there. It's incredibly evil. You've got $16 left for food and then then the Flickr account you forgot to cancel gets charged to your account, putting your balance at -$9. Now you have to pay $35/day until you get enough money to cover the overdraft fees. You end up paying $100+ for a $9 forced loan. The bank could have just decli…
USAA also batches their debts and payments differently than other banks, to help their members minimizes any fees incurred. Their customer service saying is "assume positive intent" and they have amazing service. I will probably be a customer for life.
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> e.g: if you have $10 in your account, and you make a $3 purchase, a $4 purchase, and a $12 purchase, they'll run the charges in the order of $12, $4, and $3, hitting you with three fees instead of one. Even better, if you have $10 and also a $500 paycheck hitting your account that night, which is to say that the bank KNOWS there is no overdraft and that you have the money in the account, they'll process them in thi…
I believe there is now a national banking regulation in effect that requires all credits in a day to be processed against your balance before all debits. So in your second situation, at least, you would no longer be hit with fees.