I am so mad right now. I have a few bank accounts and one is a checking with Wachovia. I stay on top of my accounts and always do what I need to do. Some of them I don’t deal with as much, but I do more with Wachovia. My husband doesn’t like them with good reason and has all but left them. He has an account with them in name only basically and has taken his real business elsewhere but I have always done what I needed to do with them and remained moderately satisfied. This week two unexpected financial things happened with large amounts of money I hadn’t anticipated! I knew I had to deposit money to cover them yesterday. I knew exactly how much money I needed to combat the emergencies that had cropped up so off to the bank I went!

Although I don’t monitor my account everyday online, I do monitor it often and I always know what is going on with my account/s! Yesterday, as soon as I got off of work, May 19th, I went into the bank and made a cash deposit of the monies I needed to cover my unexpected emergencies. The teller gave me a receipt with my balance on it and all was good! Just so you have this straight: my account was in the black when I checked it online, when I went into the bank and after my deposit! When I left the bank there was MORE than enough money to cover everything that would be coming out of my account and more! This morning I go online to check my account and of course my account is in the black but I have two overdraft charges. (heavy sigh…) Of course I call and today on May 20th, they tell me that my overdraft charges were due to two transactions that posted to my account on the 18th. But here’s the thing, there was absolutely no way I could have known that! Seriously??? Although there is a place online that tells me what transactions are in hold and what transactions are being processed, neither of these transactions were either place for me to see. I told Jerri, my CSR that I was in the black online, in the black when I walked into the bank and even deeper in the black after I made my deposit and walked out of the bank. And basically what she was told me was: “no you weren’t, but it’s not your fault for not knowing!” I was in the red the day before on the 18th but they kept it a secret from me! I didn’t know because it didn’t appear online, my teller didn’t know because she is just a person positioned to take my money and withhold the truth from me without empowerment to be a “real” CUSTOMER SERVICE REPRESENTATIVE! So although my account never visually went in the red, Wachovia bank has taken 70 of my hard earned innocent dollars hostage and refuse to give them back because it secretly went in the red!

My question I kept asking was: “what could I have done differently?” Their response: “nothing, you had no way of knowing the transactions had gone through on the 18th”. That is what Jerri told me when I called the Wachovia customer service line and the same thing Nenee Marquez told me when I called the Wells Fargo/Wachovia Headquarter office and asked for Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf. Of course she wouldn’t let me talk to him but I tried!

Here’s the other thing, if I had just been careless and if the emergencies had not arisen, my fault… I guess, but even then, how can I know if it doesn’t show up for me online nor for my teller inside the institution poised to care for my monies in the appropriate manner. And check this out… Wachovia does their debits before their credits. Here’s a great example of what I’m speaking about: if you have $10.00 in your account and you make a $1,000,000.00 (one million dollar) deposit Friday after 2:00 pm, on Monday morning if a check for $10.50 comes in, your account will go into the red/negative briefly and you WILL be charged overdraft fees, even though you still have $999,999.50 in your account! What in the world!!!

I’m hurt. I have been a great Wachovia customer! I have tried to make them my warm and fuzzy financial institution since coming to GA however, I’m not stupid. I did open another account months ago and will now be forced to make them my new warm and fuzzy. It’s all good! To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven. Ecclesiastes 3:1. My time with Wachovia is just about over. I will reroute my direct deposit, settle up with them and say goodbye. I’m just saying….

Holla back!