I’d like to tell you about a little experience my wife and I had with Bank of America recently. We have two accounts one we use to pay our bills and one we use to give me some spending money. We do this so we don’t spend the same money at the same time, this allows us the freedom to make choices without always calling and saying, “Did you write a check or are you in the store right now.”

During this recession many things have occurred. Our business is down, we have had to lay off our employees and go back to running it alone. Profits, what profits? We had to let our medical insurance lapse that we paid over $100,000 into over the last 10 years. Of course, as soon as this happened our daughter got sick and had to go to the emergency room. We’ve been handling all of this but the next thing I will tell you about is down right theft.

My wife has had to take care of our ailing twelve year old and can’t leave her for long periods of time. We have started using the transfer feature of our accounts which allows my wife to transfer money into my account for immediate use. Well, wait just a minute. Bank of America changed the policy. No longer is it for immediate use. She transferred money into my account I went to the store to pick up my daughters prescription and Bank of America charge us $35 for insufficient funds. Once this occurred we didn’t have enough in the account to pay the insufficient fund fee so they charged us again for insufficient funds because there was not enough to pay the previous fee. This happened three times before we noticed what they were doing. We called and they basically told us that this was their new policy and nothing could be done about it and “no” we could not speak with a supervisor because this “new” policy was not open to review.

I now understand that Bank of America didn’t fare to well when the recent stress tests were run on the banks. I guess they will make the money they need one over draught fee at a time.

The new Bank of America Policy amounts to, when you need money steal.

A few days later my wife went to the bank itself and asked the manager to reverse the charges, she was told, "no." The new policy has no exceptions. Needless to say we are changing banks. This may not prove anything since B of A is to big to fail but it will at least give me peace of mind.