BB&T Customer Service Nightmare and How to Avoid Overdraft Fees
I had a really bad banking experience last week – actually, it took place over 7 days and is still not quite over. I was going to blog about it and rat out the bank, but then some halfway decent customer service changed my mind. When I logged into my account today and saw YET ANOTHER FEE, I changed it back – so here goes the saga.
Photo by Worak via Flickr
Background
I have held an account at BB&T for over three years. It’s a regional bank that was the only brick-and-mortar near my first apartment. Since opening, I’ve moved twice and had the opportunity to switch to national banks with more branches and more readily-available ATMs. However, I have remained a loyal customer to BB&T, direct depositing my paychecks and running all checks and bill payments through that account – since my rent alone is $1500 a month, this is not an insignificant amount of money!
I maintain both a checking and savings account with BB&T, keeping at least $800-900 across the two accounts at any given time and more when I am going to pay bills. However, in the interest (haha) of earning a little more interest, I keep most of my cash in an online account with a better rate. I periodically make transfers to pay my bills, including my rent.
The Situation
I was going away for the 4th and wrote my July rent check on June 30. Knowing that I did not have enough cash in my checking account to cover it, I transferred $1075 from my online savings account to my BB&T checking. I then left out of town until the 5th.
Late on the 5th (Monday), I logged into my checking account and saw TWO overdraft fees ($70 total). Turns out the transfer went the wrong way — OUT of my checking instead of INTO my checking. I’m still not sure whether this was my fault or the bank’s, but we’ll go ahead and call it mine — I scheduled the transaction in a hurry, anxious to get to the beach!
As it happens, that very week I had made the decision to stop using my credit card for everything (earning points and paying it off monthly of course) and switch to using my debit card in an effort to curb spending. I had some pending debit card items from July 1st that reduced my “available balance” to right around $1,050 — so when the $1,075 transfer came out, it caused an overdraft. An auto-payment went through after, causing another overdraft. I called to confirm that pending transactions mattered when assessing overdraft fees. I then transferred $300 into my account from my BB&T savings — more than enough to bring the account back to positive AND cover the 3 remaining pending transactions. I also transferred $2,000 from my online savings account to checking — $1,000 to make up for the accidental withdrawal and $1,000 to cover the original deposit I was TRYING to make to cover my rent check. I made it very clear to the customer service rep that I did not want to receive MORE overdrafts for those pending transactions. She didn’t really understand my point that since they caused the original overdrafts by locking up funds that WERE available, they shouldn’t ALSO cause their own overdrafts.
Every other time I have ever transferred funds from savings to checking within the same bank, they credit immediately. Guess what — this time, they didn’t. And so the three pending transactions went through and caused an additional $105 in overdrafts. When I called to complain, noting that I had a $300 pending deposit, I was told pending transactions don’t count — OH WAIT, but when the pending transactions were debits they sure did! I asked politely if any of the charges could be reversed and was told no. I then said “I need to either talk to someone who can fix this, or talk to someone who can close my account.” The customer ...
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