Wells Fargo double charged everyone on their bill pays today
Happened everyone today. If you have a bill payment which paid yesterday, processed today and will be sent tomorrow, I'd say go check your account. Mine and my wife's account along with a lot of people got double charged today. We've called the customer service and they've said that everyone was charged double and they are fixing it.
Well, this sounds like wells fargo played with our money overnight and giving them back to us.
What are your thoughts?
65 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 130 ms ] threadSo, until proven otherwise it's safer to assume Hanlon's razor - Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.
This is a good reminder as to why I should choose a different bank. Thanks for posting.
However their account opening practices from years ago, and this is a good reminder they are unscrupulous.
I am being somewhat selective as I have a private client account with Chase which has been really nice, and Well's is one of the banks that offers such concierge services.
I'll admit though I only really like the low fee stuff, like free ACH/Wire Transfers, Free Bank Checks, and ATM-fee reimbursement - no limit. Not to mention they waive tons of fees for having credit cards with them.
Some of the higher value fees like using their investment manager, I don't take part in. I manage most of my retirement and savings in TDAmeritrade, Betterment and Robinhood accounts. I still maintain a rather high cash balance at my bank but I make sure to keep it below the FDIC insured amounts.
Anyways, I asked Well's to call me about their services a week ago through their website - I guess they don't want my business - oh well.
I have a state credit union account from my days as a TA in school - but they don't provide many loan services for home purchase / car purchase however I tend to use products that generate 0% interest loans on cars and home use I used Better.com because those guys are killin it - they gave me a low rate and just promised to transfer to the bank of my choice (Chase).
The only reason I really want to switch off chase is that I have to do a lot in person because of new federal compliance rules. I was setting up a Last Will etc for my wife and I and we wanted a complex beneficiary rule on cash accounts and Chase was going to make me drive 3 hours to a branch to set it up. Just seems like if something happens to me and my wife (car crash or something) it would be tough to get the cash to the right place and my attorney is telling me it'll all end up in probate.
Super morbid, but that's what made me start shopping.
https://www.bankofamerica.com/preferred-rewards/
Fidelity let's you set up all your accounts with them (including checking) as transfer on death accounts, which would avoid probate. Mine are all TOD. I have primary a secondary beneficiaries.
If you have a high cash balance you should really put it in a high interest earning account, Discover Bank, Ally, etc. Since those are all online only banks then they know how to do things without having to visit a branch. There's a zero percent chance a bank that doesn't have branches will tell you to visit a branch to do something.
It made me feel like they treat everyone that way, but I guess now that I have a few pennies to rub together I should give it a shot.
Upsides are traditional banks usually have insane fees for investment accounts, but with Fidelity (and probably Schwab) you can have it all under one roof. You generally get more options, too. For example, when I opened a 529 I could choose to "open it" in one of several states. My previous big chain bank only allowed me to open an account with the investment options in my state.
There are only two downsides I've seen so far. The first is that Fidelity does not offer personal Health Savings Accounts. This may not be a problem if you have one through your employer, or don't use one. The second is for rare instances when you might need large amounts of cash, larger than you could reasonably withdraw from an ATM. For example, purchasing a car from a private owner. Doing this might require some finagling. In my case, my employer has my 401k at a national chain bank, so I am confident I could cut a check there if I needed to, but it is a concern.
When I had a BofA account, I once asked a teller if I'd need to notify them in advance if I wanted to take out a large amount of cash; when she asked how large she was thankfully able to stifle a laugh and instead say "that should be fine" when I told her "About $5k"
I spend my money on a lot of stupid shit, don't get me wrong.
Bank fees are not one of them.
Best to get a local account without any hoops to jump through to keep it fee free in case you have to go to the bank for some odd reason and open up a fidelity or Schwab account for daily use.
Wonder if anyone has tried PNC or TD bank.
So you won't have a problem finding something better.
USAA is probably the best your going to get but they aren't open to everyone.
I've had accounts at probably 20 different banks due to churning bank account bonuses. I never had PNC before but I did have a TD account. Wouldn't recommend that one because when I signed up online it only made a shadow account and I had to go to a branch to "really" open the account to be able to use it. Of course, they didn't tell me this I had to call and be like wtf?
Car loans / Home Loans get bought up by Chase and you can service all that sort of thing in one web interface. I'm worried that local banks will make me switch back to snail mail days - I'd have personal access but boy I just want to be able to do it all virtually.
Plus, when auto pay messes up, the bank will usually make it right and you don’t have to pay any fees. If you mess up, you will have to eat the fees (usually).
Maybe it's the former poor person in me, but I don't trust anyone else to take money out of my account.
Many, many people will be put in a negative balance. Wells Fargo is probably one of those banks that don't order bill payments chronologically, but probably by amount, so things could get very very messy. There will be a lot of NSF charges that will need to be reversed, or Line of Credit charges for those accounts that have automatic line of credit to avoid NSF charges. But missed payments because of NSF will also be a problem as well, unless Wells Fargo foots the entire extra amount so that customers don't get massively fucked up.
Inertia, and the fact I don't want to lose a credit card acct I've had open forever, has kept me with WF. But those two are rapidly becoming nothing compared to all the BS from this bank.
I don't comprehend how having a cc but not actually using it leads to being trusted more
What you don't do with a credit line is just as important what you do with it.
I am guessing that data has shown people who utilize less of their available credit are more likely to not default. Whether that is morally better or not is up to you.
As for the reason this is the case, I am guessing it has to do with resisting temptation and not living right at the edge of your means. Having credit but not using it shows that you have a buffer between where you are and destitution.
My Bank of America checking account had overdraft protection that automatically would cover the overdraft from my Bank of America credit card.
I normally kept that checking account near zero, and would do a transfer from savings at the ATM to cover any checks I mailed that day. One day I didn't get around to doing that transfer and the check I had written that day bounced.
That check was to pay off my credit card bill, which I paid in full every month so as to not incur any interest charges.
Let's assume that I owed $200 on the credit card.
Result:
1. Check is not sufficient. The overdraft protection kicks in, and my credit card is charged $200 to pay off the $200 that was due on my credit card...so basically a no-op except...
2. I'm hit with an overdraft fee on the checking account, and a cash advance fee on the credit card.
The cash advance fee was quite a bit more than the interest would have been if I had simply skipped trying to pay the credit card bill that month.
The bank software really should be smart enough to recognize payments between accounts at that bank, and handle errors such as overdrafts more intelligently.
Now they should be having a chat with their BAs and their Finance on how to reverse the duplicates.
A NOC I worked at used to send company-wide pages (in 2008..) whenever something important broke. "Inadvertently" was used maybe once a month!