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From a Digg comment on our post about a WaMu branch telling a man saying they didn’t have enough money on hand to let him withdraw $4200: “funny because i had the same experience at a Wamu. My wife had trouble cashing a $5000 check and we had to drive around to three branches until finally, after insisting continuously, that they finally cashed it!”
Maybe we’re crazy but $4200 doesn’t seem like too much money to withdraw in cash at a branch bank, especially if you give them 24 hours notice. Apparently, that large of a withdrawal leaves WaMu all tapped out. Is WaMu really that short on capital reserves?
WaMu announced today that they lost $1.14 billion in the first-quarter and CEO Kerry Killinger said that nothing of this scale had happened “since the Great Depression.” Comforting!
“Nothing of this scale has happened since the Great Depression,” Chief Executive Kerry Killinger said at WaMu’s annual meeting. “This is the toughest credit cycle I have seen in my years in the industry.”
WaMu says it will cut 3,000 more jobs, including that of Mary Pugh, chair of their finance committee who “had been fiercely criticized for failing to protect Washington Mutual from overexposure to subprime and other risky mortgages,” according to Reuters.
This is Round 23 in our Worst Company in America contest, US Airways vs Washington Mutual.
I’m sick of paying ATM fees so I just finished switching to my USAA debit card for my cash money needs. They refund up to $15 of ATM fees per month and don’t charge you any fees for using other people’s ATMs. I’m still keeping my WaMu account but I took my WaMu debit card out of my wallet and just funded my USAA account with some money. Not that I have a problem but I think this will also help reduce petty cash spending. Plus, by using cash more often that means I’m getting more change, and all my coin change goes into my piggy bank (60% full at the moment, looking forward to the day I take it to the Commerce Bank “Penny Arcade” coin-counting machine). With the specter of a recession giving us all wet willies, are you making any changes to your personal finance system?
The Seattle Times reports that Washington Mutual has revised its executive bonus plan so continuing fallout from the subprime meltdown won’t affect their annual bonus checks. In a regulatory filing on Monday, the bank moved to exclude the cost of bad loans and expenses arising from foreclosures when calculating net operating profit. By way of explanation, “Spokeswoman Libby Hutchinson said the bonus plan covers almost 3,000 WaMu executives, many of whom are not directly involved in lending,” writes the Seattle Times. When those subprime raping dollars were rolling in, did any of these same executives object that their bonuses was being unfairly pumped by profits not coming from their department? (Pictured: CEO Kerry Killinger, looking clever)
“Keep track of your bank balances!”—pretty much every week on Consumerist either we or our readers say something like this.
Got an intractable Washington Mutual issue that regular customer service can’t solve? Try kicking it up to some of these bigwigs:
Taking a big company to small claims court sounds like a big hassle but reader Bill has done it successfully three times. He says the time and effort spent on taking a company to small claims court is far less then how it long it takes to get companies to fix above-average in complexity problems. [More]
A source inside Washington Mutual has sent us the internal company policy on workplace lactation. They say that they found it amusing that the bank regulates employee’s breast-milk. Overall, the policy is mainly about how one needs to go to special lactation rooms to express one’s milk (for the unaware, that’s what it’s really called). Facility specialists are available if the lactation rooms aren’t up to snuff, and company consultants are on call if you have any questions about expressing your breast milk. Elsewhere, a business writer says that, “Workplace lactation programs are inexpensive way to reduce employee absenteeism, lower health insurance costs, and improve employee retention.” Overall, it’s actually a pretty good policy, but it’s interesting to see how they talk about breastfeeding in corp speak. Oh, by the way, if you express your milk at work and store it there, make sure to label it and take it home at the end of the day. Thanks.
Reader Krissy writes in with an absolutely horrible story about dealing with WaMu after her purse was stolen. She’s been living without a checking account or debit card since October because of WaMu.
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Washington Mutual will lay off over 3,000 people. Sub-prime meltdown continues at brisk pace. [Seattle Post-Intelligencer]
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Washington Mutual forecloses on man who made every single mortgage payment, but the banks somehow misplaced his check and papers so oops we’re going to foreclose on you anyway. [Baltimore Sun]
New York Attorney General, Andrew Cuomo, announced today that he’s suing one of the nation’s largest real estate appraisal firms for conspiring with Washington Mutual to artificially inflate appraisals.
A Washington Mutual insiders tells us that the bank will refund overdraft fees for victims of the California wildfires, if they couldn’t get to an ATM, as well as ATM surcharges if they were forced to use non-WaMu machines. WaMu customer service confirmed the report. Victims can claim their refund by calling or visiting a branch location. A small but noble gesture, certainly better than AT&T | Dish asking customers if they remembered to pick up their receiver on their way out of the house and charging them $300 for not.
I am writing this note today on behalf of my 80 year old parents who have been banking with Washington Mutual. My parents account has had 10 forged checks passed on their 3 of their bank accounts. The fraud department has reimbursed one of the accounts for 2 checks after faxing a copy of the police report. However, today, after 20 days now, the fraud department has not reimbursed the other accounts. I have called fraud department many times now in an effort to recapture these funds in the amount of $1,100.00. Quite frankly the department was very rude and has been giving my parents the run around!
“I’m not quite sure how my almost-septuagenarian, fastidious, wheelchair-bound, Social Security Disability-stipend mother did it, but she forgot to list a large utilities check in her register and managed to spend over $400 that she didn’t have. For a total of TWENTY overdraft and NSF charges (at $32 a charge). Between the overdrafts, the unpaid checks (and the bounce fees on the payee side of the equation), she’s managed to tally up more than $1800 in unforeseen debt in the last two weeks. She only gets about $1000 a month, and her last check was deposited before we knew how much trouble she was in, paying this emergency debt down to about $-330 in her checking account and $500 in outstanding bounced checks and fees, and leaving her no money for utilities and no friends or relatives to beg for help from…”
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