Washington Mutual: “The Kevin Federline of Banks”
You may have noticed that among the links in my sidebar, under “Humor” I have a link to the web site of Eric D. Snider. Never heard of him? You probably have. Back in 1998, whenTitanic was all the rage, you probably got an e-mail in your inbox containing his hilariousTitanic sketch attributed to “author unknown.” That was how I first heard about him, and I’ve kept up with his humor columns and movie reviews ever since.
His column this week is called “The Feeling Is Mutual” and it’s all about making fun of the debased Washington Mutual:
At any rate, I’m writing to you [Washington Mutual] because it seems that you are in desperate straits, and I want to point and laugh at your misfortune the way you have frequently pointed and laughed at mine.Like many banks, you have been struggling because of the recent problems on Wall Street, which I do not pretend to understand. Well, that’s not entirely accurate. I do pretend to understand them. I nod my head and frown thoughtfully when I read news articles about the crisis, but secretly I’m thinking about Hot Pockets, and how I would like to eat some.Now comes the news that you, Washington Mutual, have FAILED! In fact, you are the biggest bank failure in HISTORY! Panicked customers withdrew $16.7 billion in just 10 days, making you no longer solvent, and the federal government had to step in and seize you. Then JPMorgan Chase purchased your entire company for a scant $1.9 billion. If no buyer had been found and you’d collapsed entirely, you would have nearly depleted the FDIC’s insurance funds. In short, you are a burden on society and an embarrassment to the banking community. You are the Kevin Federline of banks.You have no idea how delighted I am by this news. Your shareholders are wiped out, of course, but I’m not a shareholder. I merely have a checking account with you, the scant assets of which are safely insured by the FDIC no matter what JPMorgan Chase decides to do with you. Even if JPMorgan Chase turns every Washington Mutual branch into a homeless shelter for all your former employees, the money in my checking account is still safe.
I’ve had a checking account with WaMu since 2001, and I inadvertently wound up having a credit card with them when they merged with Providian in 2005 and inherited my Providian account. Like Eric, I got an immense sense of schadenfreude on Friday when I heard of their collapse. Here’s my own list of WaMu woes:
Incident #1 ~ I’m going to start with the most recent and work backwards. Like Eric, I don’t have very good credit because I pretty much ruined it as soon as I became an adult. I’m working on fixing it, but in the meantime, I still owe $747 on my WaMu-Providian credit card. The first week of September, WaMu called me and asked me if I would be interested in settling that account for $286. I told them that I was expecting nearly $3000 from a 2006 tax refund I never collected, that I expected the refund to arrive by the end of September, and that when it did, I would be happy to take that settlement. We made arrangements for them to withdraw $286 from my WaMu account at the end of this month, but I stipulated that my payment was dependent on the expected arrival of my tax refund.
On Thursday September 25, the tax refund money was still not in my account yet, so I called WaMu and politely asked if I could move the payment to the end of October. Within the first 20 seconds of the conversation, I was put on hold and immediately transferred to a brash, confrontational supervisor who began trying to badger me into making the payment anyways. He insisted that if I did not pay the $286 settlement by the end of September, WaMu would reject all future settlement offers from me and force me to pay the full $747. At one point he even sneered at me (actual quote), “I think you overestimate how much Washington Mutual wants your $286.”
Yeah, that’s right, snotty supervisor man. It’s not like WaMu declared bankruptcy and was bought out by one of its competitors the next day or something. WaMu’s credit is actually worsethan mine, yet they tried to talk down at me. When my tax refund comes in next month, I’m gonna make them the same $286 settlement offer (or less) and I have this funny feeling they’re gonna take it. I mean, they’re broke, and if it’s JP Morgan I’m dealing with now, I’m sure they’ll be glad to be rid of me.
Incident #2 ~ In March of last year, I contacted WaMu and asked them to put a stop on a check, agreeing to pay the $22 fee for that service. The next day, the $22 fee was taken from my account along with the check I had ordered stopped. I called WaMu to find out why they had failed to stop the check. They said it takes 48 hours to process a stop check request and that if the check comes out of your account in the meantime, you’re out of luck. No one had told me that when I requested the check stopped, and WaMu refused to refund their $22 fee or reverse the check. I immediately filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau.
One month later, a second $22 fee was taken from my checking account. I called WaMu and asked what that fee was for, but the phone tellers had no idea. They said they would look into it and someone would call me back, which they never did. A week after that, I got a letter from WaMu in response to my BBB complaint saying that they would refund the stop check fee. I called WaMu to find out when that would be done, and after helplessly looking over my account, the teller tried to tell me that he could find no record of that promise and I would have to take the letter in person to a local branch in order to have the charge refunded. I then asked him about the mysterious second $22 fee no one had been able to explain to me, and the teller suddenly realized that the second fee had been someone’s attempt to refund the first fee; they had hit the debit button instead of credit. He then issued two $22 credits back to my account. Quite the hassle all because WaMu fails at stopping checks.
Incident #3 ~ While I was at college I received a student loan check for several thousand dollars one semester. When I went to WaMu to deposit it into my account, the line at the bank was long, so I left it in the deposit box. According to the stated policy, the check would be deposited into my account by the end of the banking day. That was on a Monday.
On Wednesday of that week, I attempted to use my debit card to pay for breakfast only to have my card get declined. I spend money fast for sure, but even I would be hard pressed to spend over $3000 in two days. I called the national WaMu office and they told me they had no record of the check ever being deposited. I called the local office where I had left the check and they said, “Um, hold on a second.” The check was still in the deposit box. It had been sitting there for two days.
The local bank clerks promised that all overdraft charges would be refunded. They refunded the ones that had already posted to the account, but more were posted a few days later. It took a few weeks of wrangling with phone calls between the national WaMu office and the local Provo, Utah office to get WaMu to reverse all of the overdraft charges, and they were very stubborn about it, even though it was entirely their error.
So, if WaMu’s all that bad, why do I bother banking with them? Well, having had the same bank for almost eight years now is one of the few good things I do have going for my credit. Furthermore, I’m a little skeptical that other banks would do better. I switched from KeyBank to WaMu in 2001 because I was tired of KeyBank’s ridiculous fees, and WaMu advertised that it didn’t have silly fees and charges like “all those other banks,” something I now know to be one of the most disingenuous lies I’ve ever heard. So, all banks are liars and one will probably try to screw you over as bad as the next one. Lesson learned.
Categories:
0 коментарі:
Post a Comment