This handy guide from The Consumerist will help you find free checking in a world where more and more big banks are likely to do away with their free checking (or what they claimed was free checking but often wasn’t) to make up for their lost fee stream due to changes in regulation.
Tips | admin June 21, 2010 | 
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It usually takes two to tango and with problems between Chase and its customers, this is often true. What I mean is that it is often the case that customers have done something the either exacerbated Chase stupidity, or created an opening in the first place. For instance, if everyone kept better track of their checking account balance, outrageous overdraft fees and predatory rearrangement of deposits and debits to maximize those fees wouldn’t be a problem.
But that ought to be irrelevant, because really truly good customer service would help you be a better person, not help you be a worse one. But making it easier for people to be late with payments, to miss payments, to borrow too much, to spend more than is in their checking account, that drives profits for Chase and other big banks.
Along those lines we find this story:
The crux of the problem with Chase is that I made a mistake in a payment in January, 2007. I paid the amount of $611.96 rather than the amount of $877.96 that was actually due.
This problem is that Chase did not notify me for 31 consecutive months that they were charging me a late fee of $23.51 for each and every month since 1/12/07 and that a total of $728.81 in late fees was due at that point. The amount has since grown to over $1,000.00.
This is so often the case with Chase, that they simply fail to notify customers of a critical detail that balloons into a bigger problem. A truly good bank would have gone out of their way to contact the customer, find out the reason for the incorrect payment, and try to resolve the problem. If it was simply a mistake and could be easily fixed, a good bank would make sure it got fixed. But to let a problem go 31 months without actually contacting the customer to try and figure out what is going on, is simply ridiculous.
Bad bad Chase | admin June 20, 2010 | Comments (0)
Chase is notorious for doing things that HUGELY affects its customers and never actually telling them. For example, changing minimum payments, interest rates, or available credit which customers only find about if they happen to notice the changes on their bill.
Chase is also notorious for foreclosing on properties such that the homeowners only find out about it when someone knocks on their door to take possession of the property.
Well, if CA bill 1275 is passed, they would be required to communicate their customers in the following ways:
Presumably, if the bank fails to properly communicate these things, homeowners will have some recourse to go after them in case of foreclosure.
Furthermore, the bill contains provisions that would allow homeowners to get foreclosure sales reversed if they are due to servicer errors. There is presently no recourse for this.
It has been quite an education blogging on the badness of Washington Mutual and Chase Bank over the last five years. I am amazed at the number of negative experiences, pitfalls, and amount of bad behavior of those two banks. While many banks seem to have a business model based more on tricking you than serving you, the success of that model depends heavily on the ignorance of consumers and their continued tendency to make uninformed and simply bad choices.
An article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday (The New Bank Fees: How to Fight Back) tells us what is on the horizon: More fees whose details are not spelled out prominently, but hidden in the mundane paperwork we receive from from our banks.
The sad thing is, going from bank victim to savvy customer is not that difficult.
The first and foremost thing you can do to become a better bank customer is to read everything you get from your bank. Personally, I scan and save copies of all paperwork I receive, including and especially that paperwork which spells out the terms and conditions of my account. This allows me to not only know what conditions I am bound by, but also see how they’ve changed over time. Reading my bank paperwork can easily catch changes in minimum required payment, due date, and interest rate, all things that can trip customers up. Reading over all of your paperwork also includes reviewing all charges on your account to identify possible fraud early and contacting your bank if you see anything that doesn’t look right.
Second, know what your options are. If your bank is treating you like they don’t really value you as a customer, shop around for a better alternative. If you bank with one of the big banks like Chase, try looking at credit unions, which Consumer Reports says are a better choice for most banking needs, including and especially credit cards. Services like bankrate.com do a pretty good job of comparing different banks and credit card companies making it easy for you to find the best deal.
Lastly, come on people, stop borrowing more than you can afford to pay back. That is not the way to financial freedom and becoming too debt heavy causes stress and reduces your ability to easily switch banks and credit card companies to get a better deal. If you use a credit card, only spend as much on it as you can afford to pay off every month.
All I can say about this story is, this sounds REALLY BAD, even for Chase.
We were in the middle of a loan mod when we got the foreclosure notice stapled on our home…we called Chase they said to ignore it and we continued with the loan mod. Then a Real Estate agent told me our home WAS sold the end of July 2009. We then again called Chase and they told us that our loan mod was done and we were fine and if it was sold it would be re instated…once again we believed them. Our loan mod documents showed up via Fed ex in August 2009 and we have made our payments until April of 2010 when we were served an Eviction notice by a bank who bought it back in July of 2009!!…Now we had to hire an attorney since Chase was collecting our money and billing us and on paper the house isn’t theirs…it belongs to Federal Home Bank… so now what??? The attorney got the eviction stopped for now but Chase won’t respond to his letters…we still are living here but Chase isn’t getting anymore of our money untill I know where it is going.
It looks like Chase has graduated from petty crimes against its customers to pulling off some serious fraud. Could a big sophisticated bank like Chase really be this inept, or are they seriously getting into simply defrauding people?
Thanks to chasehomefinancesucks.com for turning us on to this one.
Bad bad Chase | admin June 19, 2010 | Comments (0)
As a small business owner, from time to time the business needs to borrow money. Because we have worked wit the same business focused bank for 5 years, and they know us well, and maintain our accounts in good standing with them, when it comes time to borrow money, it doesn’t take them too long to say yes. This is called having a relationship with a bank.
Similarly, with my present bank, a smaller bank that prides itself on service, I know the people in the branch I bank at and have very little trouble getting things done.
Now compare those experiences with this one:
Chase gives me the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
Went into a branch this afternoon to cash a birthday check (yay HB to me)!They say it exceeds my current balance (payday is today friday…) and they can’t cash it for an amount that exceeds my existing balance.
HURR.
WaMu didn’t do that to me (member since ’95, so i know this). His reasoning: “you could write a check to yourself, cash it for more than you have, then bounce it and we are out the money.”
Uhm dude. yeah. That can happen. But this is a birthday check from my mother. WTF Make the policy you can’t write checks to yourself…? Thanks for calling me a potential criminal TO MY FACE.
So I said never mind, took my check back, and walked over to FirstTech where I recently reopened a new account and she was nice, friendly, and cashed it without question. I left some money in the account for fun, but honestly: starting this week I’m moving all my accounts totally over to the CU. I’m so done with banks.
See the difference? Chase could have easily looked at the customers history with the bank and seen that they are a good risk. They could have run the check and verified that the account it was coming from had sufficient funds. Instead, they simply played by a hard rule and relationship didn’t figure into the picture at all.
Even the new credit union the customer recently opened was willing to accommodate the customers request. Chase isn’t a customer service organization, it is a fee generating machine. That’s it.
I’ve often been critical of Chase employees as giving bad advice, not knowing what they are talking about, or otherwise inept behavior. When I came upon this job search forum discussing Chase, I began to understand some of the reasons why Chase employees might be this way.
The overwhelming majority of comments on the JP Morgan Chase forum are negative. Chase is accused by many people of running a sweatshop and for having high turnover.
Those two along could account for the majority of deficiencies in ability in professionalism Chase staff often exhibit. If Chase refuses to hire enough staff, customers won’t get the help they need, staff is overworked and stressed, doesn’t last long, and there are frequently fresh faces who probably aren’t going to stick around long enough to get properly trained.
