I got stuck with Chase because WaMu bought my bank long ago. WaMu wasn’t so awful that I switched, but there were trying times. Once, I made a deposit into my savings account. Then I moved some money online the next day into my checking account (and online, it looked like the money was there). Then I made an ATM withdrawal. Turns out, there was a hold on the deposit (invisible on the web) and they charged me $30 in fees (quite a bit, at the time) to use overdraft protection, both for the ATM withdrawal and to move money back into my savings account from my checking account. By the time they were done, they had charged me $30 to effectively reverse the online transfer I had made. I was on the phone with them for a solid hour. In the end, they admitted that the website didn’t show the hold, but they said that showing the holds confused their customers. The supervisor refunded the charges, but said admonishingly “You can’t do this again.”
FLU, I nearly got burned by the fees you speak of on the savings account. After the takeover, Chase sent out reams of fine print in various stages to old WaMu customers. I poured over them and found a couple of gotchas, including the end of the “direct deposit waives minimum balance” program, which I think was scheduled for March or April of this year (long after the rest of the transition was supposed to be complete).
I’ve been considering switching to SDCCU for my primary banking, but the headache of changing all the little places that do direct deposit and ACH just doesn’t seem worth it in the short term. I know if I try to switch I’ll end up screwing something up and not paying some bill. At least I know I can manage the status quo OK.
However, if they do manage to charge me some unreasonable BS fee that they won’t reverse, I’m outta there.
And ditto to their damn credit card offers. Back in the day we got three a week. My wife had opened three cards with different banks over the years, and in the end, we ended up with 4 Chase credit cards (after they bought everyone). Chase ended up closing them all last year due to lack of activity. But for some reason, they keep sending us offers…
