Skip to main content

Being a banker must be nice

Image
By
Trying to close my FNB (First National Bank) account here in South Africa I got a visceral reminder of what kind of service banks are providing the average customer.  First, just to close the account requires a fee of about R50.  I had left about R20 in there, but as it turns out FNB had charged me a bunch of fees that put me in the hole, and then a R88 "service fee" which I assumed was from being forcibly overdrafted.  I suspect there's some kind of automatic procedure that trips a bunch of fines if you ever let your account balance get to low so they can then charge you for overdrafting.  Anyway, I had to pay to get my balance up to the correct amount, and pay an additional deposit fee to allow me to put money into my own account.

The best part, though, was after waiting about twenty minutes for the deposit to go through, they had one more fine of R9.50 waiting for me on another screen, so I had to pay the deposit fee again to finish the process.  I considered throwing a howling fit, but it seemed unlikely to pay off.  In any case, be warned.
Labels:

Comments

  1. AnonymousAugust 18, 2011 at 6:55 PM

    A couple of years ago, my teenage son's account had a 50 cent balance when he checked his account at an ATM to see if a $25 check had been credited. It hadn't, and he was not aware that the bank charged $1 for the balance inquiry, overdrawing his account. That cost him $35. The next day, assuming his $25 check had cleared, he used his debit card to pay for a subway ticket (about $1). Since the bank had taken all of the $25 check because of the $35 overdraft fee, the $1 ticket cost another $35 overdraft fee. This set off a series of overdrafts. By the time his $200 paycheck from his part time job got deposited, he owed the bank about $300. When I went to the bank with my son to try to get some fees refunded, the bank only agreed to waive 2 of the overdraft fees, meaning the bank got to keep the entire $225 my son had deposited. They prey on kids and low income folks. The US financial reforms last year helped the problem some, but now Wells Fargo is instituting a debit card fee. In order use your card to access your money, you will now have to pay a monthly debit card fee. Yes, being a banker is nice.

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousAugust 19, 2011 at 3:13 AM

    Good Grief, what a horror story. Like Ryan, I went to close my FNB account as part of the COS procedure. I had an overdraft of approximately R100 and had to pay R387 in order to close my account. There was not even an itemization of the fees, just the receipt for R387. Like Ryan, I assumed silence was the better part of valor. B

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why Did Reality Winner Leak to the Intercept?

By
So Reality Winner, former NSA contractor, is in federal prison for leaking classified information — for five years and three months, the longest sentence of any whistleblower in history. She gave documents on how Russia had attempted to hack vendors of election machinery and software to The Intercept , which completely bungled basic security procedures (according to a recent New York Times piece from Ben Smith, the main fault lay with Matthew Cole and Richard Esposito ), leading to her capture within hours. Winner recently contracted COVID-19 in prison, and is reportedly suffering some lingering aftereffects. Glenn Greenwald has been furiously denying that he had anything at all to do with the Winner clusterfuck, and I recently got in an argument with him about it on Twitter. I read a New York story about Winner, which clearly implies that she was listening to the Intercepted podcast of March 22, 2017 , where Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill expressed skepticism about Russia actually b
Post a Comment
Read more

The Basic Instinct of Socialism

By
This year I finally decided to stop beating around the bush and start calling myself a democratic socialist. I think the reason for the long hesitation is the very long record of horrifying atrocities carried out by self-described socialist countries. Of course, there is no social system that doesn't have a long, bloody rap sheet, capitalism very much included . But I've never described myself as a capitalist either, and the whole point of socialism is that it's supposed to be better than that. So of course I cannot be a tankie — Stalin and Mao were evil, terrible butchers, some of the worst people who ever lived. There are two basic lessons to be learned from the failures of Soviet and Chinese Communism, I think. One is that Marxism-Leninism is not a just or workable system. One cannot simply skip over capitalist development, and any socialist project must be democratic and preserve basic liberal freedoms. The second, perhaps more profound lesson, is that there is no s
6 comments
Read more

Varanus albigularis albigularis

By
That is the Latin name for the white-throated monitor lizard , a large reptile native to southern Africa that can grow up to two meters long (see pictures of one at the Oakland Zoo here ). In Setswana, it's called a "gopane." I saw one of these in my village yesterday on the way back from my run. Some kids from school found it in the riverbed and tortured it to death, stabbing out its eyes, cutting off its tail, and gutting it which finally killed it. It seemed to be a female as there were a bunch of round white things I can only imagine were eggs amongst the guts. I only arrived after it was already dead, but they described what had happened with much hilarity and re-enactment. When I asked why they killed it, they said it was because it would eat their chickens and eggs, which is probably true, and because it sucks blood from people, which is completely ridiculous. It might bite a person, but not unless threatened. It seems roughly the same as killing wolves that
4 comments
Read more