Why Banks Suck

Aside from the obvious reasons--the financial meltdown, inflated executive bonuses, ridiculous fees, blah, blah, blah--I discovered another thing that makes me want to stuff money into my mattress.

I'm already pissed off about the lame way Chase is handling WAMU's switchover, but that's to be expected. What really lit a fire under me today was the fact that some random insurance company decided to withdraw money out of my account without my authorization. To top it off, this caused my account to be overdrawn. Yeah, not nice. Unfortunately, I did not discover this until after I deposited a check into this account. Now I can't even close it until the check clears and I can safely take out the money.

I called WAMU to file a dispute so hopefully the fee will be reversed and my money will be returned. They told me to call the company and have them reverse the charge, but after some online research, I discovered that this was happening to a crapload of WAMU and Chase customers. The charge was showing up in my account as a debit with no PIN authorization, but apparently this company was using routing and account numbers from checks. According to my findings, this insurance company was identified as a division under the AIG umbrella--another reason to hate them. I did attempt to call them, but the little recording said they had a high volume of phone calls and the wait would be longer than usual. Yeah, I think I know why they have a high volume of calls. Perhaps they should stop stealing people's money!

With all these banks merging and buying each other out to form these SuperBanks, I'm wondering more and more about their ability to secure my personal information and money.

Until this whole thing gets resolved, I've initiated every alert I can think of on that account to make sure I know exactly what's going in and coming out in the next week or two. Once I'm in the clear, I'm shutting that thing down. They're not taking more of my hard-earned money. That privilege only goes to the government--mainly because I don't really have a choice in the matter.