I can personally attest that getting your bank balance via text from Bank of America is a waste of time and texts. I signed up for it last year and it was fine for a few months. Then, I stopped getting them altogether for another 2 or so months, and then I started getting them again earlier this month.

Problem is - they are incredibly inaccurate. Sometimes the days are way off and it'll say: "Your checking balance as of 7/14/09 is..." - which would be fine, except it's 7/20/09. And then the balances would be way off.

I tried to figure out how they were coming up with these numbers and just gave up and unsubscribed from the service. It's much easier to check my balance via Web browser (which would show a more accurate balance despite having JUST got a text that says something different) or using the BoA mobile app.

Here's a thought, know how much you have in you account and don't spend more than that amount.

New law(s) needed (because a free market clearly has failed to get banks to do what most people want):

Banks must allow customers to choose the order of check processing, by means of a notation on the account indicating the sorting order desired (high-to-low vs. low-to-high) as well as the ability to designate (at least 5) specific checks to be processed first.

Banks may not charge more than 15% above their actual costs for the special handling. They must justify the fees they state with a filing to the appropriate federal agency (and public can read it) detailing current costs for each of these kinds of handling.

the piece about bigger debits first is utter garbage. most banks, esp. BoA make you sign up for the 'autodraft protection' which gives around $500 to protect you. so even after you got your candy bar, you mortgage payment can still go through.

@Vanilla5 when i had my BoA account i found the website to be just as bad... pending debits would disappear for weeks at a time before popping back up as posted.

@Scott Thompson: Autodraft protection is something you need to be approved for, you have to have good/decent credit. not everyone can have that/is eligible for that on their account.

Overdraft fees are ridiculously high and should be capped.

However, people should really track how much money they have and only spend that much. If you overdraft, it is the account owners fault.

@Scott Thompson: Can I have your mortgage payment?

Also, even with Autodraft protection, they charge a fee, at least my bank does.

At Wachovia, overdraft protection is attached to either your savings account or your Wachovia credit card. You are still hit with fees for every item that draws on that overdraft protection. All it does is allow the debit/check/charge to go through.

For this very reason, my bank clears transactions smallest to largest so you get LESS fees. Sure you get the other side of the coin "WHY DIDNT YOU PAY MY MORTGAGE BUT PAID MY CANDY BARS RAWR RAWR RAWR!!" but a bank that has a practice of not processing just to create fees is a good bank to have IMO.

@ckaught78: If you have never overdrafted, then you may have a right to say that. But for most people, it has happened at least once.

Either way, it doesn't make the bank's practice of processing the largest charge first any less evil.

I would suggest overdraft protection, either through a savings account or credit card. If you use a savings account, make sure you keep enough in it to cover a pretty big "oops". I would suggest a $200 minimum. If you use a credit card, use it only for your overdraft protection so that it is easier to repay if it does get used.

@Scott Thompson: Do you mean the overdraft protection (which is basically a credit card)? They can't make you sign up for that. I've had BoA accounts since 2000 and have never had to sign up for that.

Where do i sign up for the Class Action? Wachovia has taken a chunk out of my several times over the years.

lol @ "neener neener"

@ckaught78: Wow, whoda thunk that *math* was the way to fix this problem (SarcasmOff).

Seriously, with the myriad ways in which banks debit your account, direct-debits from various sources, debit cards and fraud (or transactions in error) your comment is breathtakingly ignorant of reality. It would be wonderful if we could all live in your perfect world, but, alas, you're the only one inhabiting that planet.

Lots of luck in your perfect world.....it's gonna get kinda lonely, tho.

@jc364: Which works great until someone accidentally double-charges you for something, or you get a 24 quadrillion dollar charge because the credit card company screwed up, and then you have 15 overdraft fees because that first mistake put you over the limit and every subsequent transaction went through..

Watching your account and spending carefully can only take you so far.

@Nancy Chung: See my reply to ckaught78 above. Other parties do make errors which can cause you to overdraft. Blanket statements make Baby Jesus cry.

Funny, the "Candy Bar" is a strip club near where I used to live. And, yeah, I'd guess that you wouldn't want to bounce a check there, either.

@thebluepill: Word! I want in too.

@trashbaby: what pray tell, is the name of your glorious bank? I would love to bring my business there.

@You know what ole' Jack Burton always says: I dont think the settlement would even begin to cover the money BoA has robbed me of.

It's about time. (And no, I have never paid any CC or bank fees.)

If banks can order charges by amount, they can assess if they all will go through or not. If all would go through, then the banks are knowingly ordering fees specifically to get more money and it cannot be construed as to be in the consumer's interest.

If you eliminate overdraft fees, the bank will go out of business. Banks are not the banks your father had: they are retailers that resell loans and charge fees: teller fees, overdraft fees, maintenance fees, returned check fees, inactivity fees, ATM fees, check processing fees, notary fees, statement fees, etc., etc. Credit unions aren't much better now; I've looked. They have most of the same exact fees. So just what are they doing with my money while it's in their bank? Selling it to other banks?

Hmmm...you write a check you don't have enough in your bank account to cover, (your mistake), and the bank bounces the check, (it's not their job to pay your bills). They offer you a service, pay $xx.xx and they will cover your check. YOU CHOOSE. BOUNCE or COVERED FOR A FEE. You don't want the fees? KEEP TRACK OF YOUR BALANCE. Stop blaming others for your irresponsibility.

@ckaught78: Wow, why didn't anyone ever think of that? Thank you for that fabulous insight!

I'm all for personal responsibility as well, but even if you've never overdrafted, you don't have a right to belittle people who have. Just count yourself lucky that you've never been put in the situation where making one small mistake (or even having something happen that's out of your control) can result in you owing the bank hundreds of dollars when a reversed transaction order could have meant a much more manageable charge.

I'm glad to see that the banks are being taken to task for such a shady practice, and I hope this will result in their policies being changed.

@ckaught78: And what happens when, you know, someone gains illegal access to your account, or some unscrupulous merchant decides to double-charge your account, or your bank deposits some random Joe's money into some other random Joe's account, and for some reason believe that they mistakenly put that money into YOUR account, or any one of about 15 million other possible reasons that can cause a person to overdraw their account through no fault of their own?

You shouldn't be able to overdraft in the first place. Just a nice "We apologize, but your account has insufficient funds to complete this transaction", and that's that.

The fact is not that consumers are stupid and/or should be paying more attention - even if either of those is true it doesn't change the point of the article, which is that banks are predatory and actively want you to overdraft so they can lay more fines on your accounts.

@ckaught78: I've actually overdrafted an account when I was in a different time zone and my regularly scheduled deposit had about an hour or two before it went through. There are plenty of strange reasons for overdrafts.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I have never had a bank charge me an overdraft fee where they didn't also let the transaction go through. If you're going to process all the transactions anyway then changing the order only affects the number of fees you can charge.

If banks are truly concerned about their customers making their mortgage payments then they should operate in a way that leaves the customers with less of a negative balance, not more.

@Nancy Chung: Ever had a minimum wage college student accidentally charge your card twice for $500 worth of textbooks? Didn't result in an overdraft, but considering the 6 or so small charges accrued earlier that day that could have hurt if there was an overdraft and the order got flip flopped.

@Nancy Chung: Yeah? Who do you blame for your ignorance?

@angelzero: I still write the occasional check. You know that paper document that might not drop into your account for up to 90 days or (depending on who you wrote it to) more? I frequent a couple of local businesses that don't take credit card and this is my preferred method of payment. I can write for the exact amount rather than taking $20s out of the ATM and rounding.

@vastrightwing: What exactly (apart from payroll & property) are major expenditures for banks? Interest on savings accounts is ridiculously low right now. All a large bank should have to do to stay afloat is make well thought out loans. If you don't have a massive investing arm then you don't have to pay your fund managers massive salaries and you don't have the massive risks. Sure, your profits will be lower, but they will be stable and we need stable banks more than we need cash fountains.

@ckaught78: WHOA. How original! I guess we can shut the site down now.

@ckaught78: While I'm impressed that you never make mistakes, I am sadly not that amazing. I've been known to get my wires crossed which week is direct-deposit week and which isn't, or which months my paychecks stop. (As a teacher, I get only 21 paychecks a year, so they stop mid-June.)

I have my savings account set up as the overdraft protection for my checking, with more than enough to cover any mistakes. I figure that the $5 my bank charges me for the overdraft transfer is well earned, as a payment for my own carelessness. However, much more than that would be excessive. My bank transfers a lump sum from my savings to checking in the event of an overdraft, rather than dealing with individual transactions. This seems a pretty reasonable way to do things, and isn't that hard to code into the software.

And that's what makes me a loyal customer.

If only everyone did everything right the first time! Pay attention to your own shady mortgages. You should've known you were being lied to. Pay attention to your investments. You should've known that it was a pyramid scheme.

@erhudock: Ah, but your reasoning fails if you try to manage your check book in the way consumers were always taught- in historical sequence. People often do have plan to have enough money in the account but the deposit / debit squence is now slanted to the banks making money. Before, if a problem debit cropped up it would only affect the items after it in the time squence. Now a problem affects everything of a lesser value than it that are debited that day...

Only problem I have with Mint.com (and I LOVE Mint.com) is that it doesn't account for any pending transactions on your account.

@vastrightwing: Banks got into the negative fees back in the ATM days when they stopped allowing ATM activity for free...

I had a similar problem with Western Security Bank a few years back.
I had 2 direct deposits pending on my account on the 5th, 3 auto bill payments due to be charged on the 6th.
On the 6th, I checked my account, it said I had the money from the two direct deposits, which would have brought my balance to 300 dollars more than what was needed to pay the auto-bills-payments once they posted.
So i went about my day, put gas in my car, went out to lunch, along with miscellaneous other charges. , paying with my check card.
When I checked my account the next day, I was around 300 in the red.

When I called the bank, they listed the order that my transactions were processed.

Can you see where this is going?

They processed the 3 bill payments first, from large to small,
then my check card transactions, again from big to small,
Funny enough, the first bill payment overdrew my account, causing everyhing from a 200 dollar server payment, to a 4 dollar pack of smokes to run up a 35 dollar overdraft charge.
Then, after they were done putting my account over 1000 dollars in the hole, they processed my direct deposits, bringing me upto around -300.

So, I told them to either reverse the charges, and they would keep me as a customer, or they could sod off, never see the money, and loose not only me, but most of the people I know who *had* accounts there.

@ckaught78: I agree. But once in a while, my husband and I will both make a decent size purchase on our joint account using our two debit cards, and not tell each other until we get home. We each log into the bank website to check our balance before making a purchase over say, $100, but if both of us make it around the same time, and it takes a day to show up on the bank website, we can get mixed up. It's only happened a couple of times in a decade, but it happens.

Another time there was a screw up with our direct deposit at work. Even after years of direct deposit with the same company, one day my twice monthly paycheck did not deposit on the 1st as it had faithfully for years. It was the same day my mortgage payment automatically deducts online. Our payroll dept. apologized for the error and reimbursed us for any overdraft fees.

@Vanilla5:
here's a solution. leave BoA forever.

My ex used to bank with PNC Bank. One time, she deposited money on Friday (when the bank was still open), and paid a bill on Saturday. The bank put a stop on her deposit so they could deduct the amount for the bill first on Monday when they opened, which caused the account to go into overdraft. She'd only put in just enough to pay the bill and didn't use her account again for a week - by which time they'd charged her over $200 in overdraft fees.

@Divals: ..I'm not sure why that went through as a reply, it was supposed to be the start of a new thread.

@Gene Gemperline: Maybe it's your bank? I use Mint and it does show pending transactions. I can go into Mint right after I buy something online and it will show up.

@squinko: But in his perfect world he is not encumbered by these 'kick people when they are down' type rules, so why should he care? Oh... until someone misses their payments to his company because they lost the money to overdraft fees instead. Some people look at everything from the perspective of one single step, not the overall repercussions of having more money being funneled aimlessly into the banking industry instead of industry that actually produce real goods.

@erhudock: What bank do you use that allows you the choice between overdrawing or bouncing a check? Every bank I've ever had (that'd be three, so far) decides on or the other on a seemingly random basis.

@Adrienne Willis:

Ask Ben Popken! :D

@ckaught78: I'm sure if you did this by mistake, Mr. Without Sin, you wouldn't be throwing stones now. You'd be hopping mad at BofA the McBank just like everybody else who has already been burned. As a really wise person once said, "judge not, lest ye be judged."

my wife was double-charged for a 1 night hotel stay- so there was $200 outta our account we didn't plan on.

Would have caused hundreds in overdraft fees if I didn't happen to be doing bills the next day and notice it.

I think consumers should be asked by their bank the order they want their fees deducted-- let people CHOOSE.