Why I left Bank of America for a credit union and you should too!
I had a checking account with Bank of America for over 15 years. Over those 15 years I started to see that Bank of America did a lot of shady business practices. All of these shady things favored them and never me. They would make mistakes in totaling up checks at the end of the month and they would wrongly assess me and over the balance fee and/or their typical $14.99 per month monitoring fee – really I had used your account in your bank for over 15 years and you need to monitor me?
I had to be wary and read through every monthly bank statement and look for all the wrongful fees and then spend hours on the phone calling them up to argue about these fees at the end of every single month. They may sound trivial at first, but they did this to me for a very long time – many years.
And I believe they do this to everybody as I have heard this for many of my friends, relatives and associates that also have or currently do business with Bank of America. And look at Bank of America in their own actions with customers. In the early 2000’s they came out with this idea called Keep the Change. It was supposedly to encourage account holders to increase their savings by rounding up charges to the next nearest dollar for every purchase.
Instead what they found was it took advantage of more than half of their customers whom could no longer correctly balance their accounts and found they were receiving charge after charge for overdraft fees and minimum monitoring charges. It was finally released to the press that Bank of America made over $100 million off their customers by the keep the change program. Almost all of it by profiting off people on the low end that could barely scrape by. That’s deplorable.
When this finally came out and hit the press and the news Bank of America was forced to stop this ridiculous money making program. It also, came out later on that it was designed to do that. It was never made to benefit the customer. Nothing Bank of America does is to benefit the customer – keep that in mind. Everything they do is for their own profit. I have friends that for years have worked at Bank of America have left to go elsewhere because it’s not just about profiting the company. It’s only about profiting the upper executive echelon.
Bank of America also likes to profit off their employees and take advantage of them. The only ones it doesn’t do that too is the upper executives like the CEO, CFO, etc… They get Cadillac health insurance policies all paid for by the company. They get multiple expensive country club memberships all paid for by the company. Limos and limo drivers, personal security guards staff, on top of multi-million-dollar salaries and huge stock options which can easily result in hundreds of millions of dollars of pay.
Everyone else they just take complete advantage of. They don’t care and is just about the bottom line and ripping off as many people as they can until they get caught. Well I finally had enough and switched to a local credit union Piedmont Advantage (used to be the Piedmont Airlines Employees Credit Union). And guess what? No more $14.99 per month monitoring fees. No more accounting errors in favor of the bank at the end of every month that result in huge fees. I no longer have to spend hours on the phone with Bank of America arguing over wrongful entries or deductions for my account.
I get better rates, terms, better treatment and I’m saving myself hundreds and possibly even thousands of dollars every year by having made that switch. All I can say is see ya Bank of America – asta lavista scumbag bank. If you have an account with Bank of America I highly advise that you look into any credit unions and get out as soon as you can. Also make sure you look at your monthly bank statements because that’s where they make their money. 90% of people do not read their bank statements every month and missed these extra charges. $40 here and $15 there may not sound like a lot, but when you have millions of customers you’re doing that to it quickly adds up. Bank of America did that just 1 million people – which you know they are. Think about – let’s just take the $15 per month charge will leave out the $40 on and any other ones. $15 per month times 1 million customers is $15 million per month.
$15 x 1 million customers = $15 million per month!
That’s just pure revenue. Now multiply it by just 10 months and you get $150 million per year. Now guess where that goes? Executive pay and compensation, bonuses and perks. It doesn’t go to the bottom employees are in the middle employees. They get let go routinely and then rehired to lower their pay or reduce their bonuses. It only goes to the upper echelon. Now he put in all the other fees and stop your talking hundreds of millions of dollars in mostly bogus fees. Then you put in the fact that Bank of America is banking on the fact that over 90% of of their customers will miss or not notice these charges. They are simply ripping people off left and right.
The best thing you can do if you are a Bank of America customer is start looking to take your business elsewhere. The best thing you can do is go to a credit union where they will not rip you off. You are then a member of the credit union and their business is to provide you with better service, no ridiculous fees, no taking advantage of you to enrich the upper Executives like at Bank of America, etc…
Some credit unions you need to be an employee of a certain company. But that has become relaxed in recent years as in many, of these credit unions you just need to know somebody that is an employee of that company to qualify. There are also credit unions that are opening themselves up to citizens of certain cities and metropolitan areas – like Charlotte Metro credit union. Any of these is a far better option than Bank of America. Pretty much anything is a better option than B of A!
