My wife has a small sewing business making baby blankets and accessories. She recently went to the bank to deposit a bunch of checks from her friends and customers. A week later we receive a message in the mail that one of the checked we cashed bounced and we were being charged a $6.00 fee. We spoke to the customer who was very embarrassed and promptly paid us for the merchandise and the fee. She also was hit a $30 overdraft fee from her bank.
My wife and I went to our local branch (our bank is one of the top 5 banks in the US) to inquire about the fee and take care of some other business. To our surprise, the personal banker who had been on the job for 7 months had no idea how much the fee was. I requested to the terms and conditions of my Platinum Checking and Savings accounts. Upon review there were plenty of sections about what would happen if I bounced a check that I wrote, but absolutely nothing about the $6.00 fee for someone else's check. The banker huddled with the branch manager and she could not produce any documentation about the fee as well. They indicated they would research it and get back to me.
I am not going to let this one slide and will be requesting the $6.00 to be put back into my account if they do not produce any documentation on it. The bottom line is you should actually take the time to review the terms and conditions of your banking accounts. If you opened your accounts years ago, you have even more reasons to go to your branch and see how many changes to the Terms and Conditions you were never aware of and are now subject to because you did not know they existed.
If you take me up on this, let me know if you discover any outrageous fees or things that caught you off guard about your accounts.
