This September has not been my month! I just went through a hellish week of dealing with banks and credit unions. I'll start this story by saying that I just refinanced my car, and my first payment on this new loan was this month. The credit union that I got the loan from (referred to from here on out as "The Lender") included a Savings account to go with my loan. I doubt that I'll be able to add anything to it, since I need every bit of money I get. I got a decent check on the 10th, most of which was going to go to the car payment, most of my bills, and groceries. I was not aware that The Lender was going to automatically take the amount of my car payment out of my bank's checking account (referred to here on out as The Bank) every month, in fact, their welcome letter mentions how to set up loan payments. So, I made a car payment on the 11th.
Right after I woke up on Thursday the 16th, my first day off since the previous Saturday, I checked my bank account to see how much I had. Instead of seeing a few hundred dollars, I saw -$137, $36 of which was overdraft fee. As I said earlier, I didn't know that The Lender was taking it out every month, so I ended up making my car payment twice. I called The Lender to see about having one of my payments refunded, and they said they'd do it. I checked my bank account frequently that Thursday and Friday to see if it transferred. I called The Lender late Friday afternoon to see if there was any progress on the transfer, and they said that it was transferred. The problem was that they transferred it to The Lender's Savings account instead of The Bank's Checking account, where I actually fucking needed it. I don't know why they couldn't transfer it from the Savings account to my proper Bank account, because you'd think that if they can take it out, they can surely fucking put it back in! What I ended up having to do was add my bank account as an External Account that I could transfer money to, but I couldn't immediately start transferring money to it, it had to be verified first. They did this by sending a couple of micro-transactions to the account, and once they posted, I had to confirm each amount to verify it. The micro-transactions hadn't posted by Saturday morning, so I borrowed $200 from a friend to get my bank account back in the positive.
The micro-transactions posted on Monday, but I couldn't verify them until I got off from work because The Lender's mobile banking app didn't have the option of verifying it, and their website didn't seem to work on Safari. I probably could've done it on my computer in the warehouse, but I was afraid that either The Bank or The Lender's web sites would want to text me a verification number so I could sign on from those devices, and I'm not privileged enough to be able to take my phone to the warehouse floor. Oh, and I don't typically get off from work until 6:30. All this wouldn't have been a problem had my automatic car insurance payment not posted that same day, putting my bank account back in the negative along with adding another $36 overdraft fee to my account. By the time I was able to get home and verify the micro-transactions, it was too late to schedule the transfer of funds for that day, so the transfer was scheduled for the next day. Thankfully, the transfer was posted by Wednesday morning, letting me breathe a sigh of relief. I then messaged The Bank on Thursday morning to see if they could refund me the $72 of overdraft fees, seeing as that it wasn't my fault that The Lender refunded the wrong account, and that I had to wait all god damned weekend for the micro-transactions to post so I could transfer the refund to them. I was afraid that I'd have to give them more bad publicity on social media if they didn't refund me, but lo and behold they did it! More relief! As for the friend that I owed $200 to, I paid her back when I got paid that Friday morning.
You know, I've always though that The Notorious B.I.G. was full of shit when he said, "Mo' money, mo' problems!" I prefer Al Jourgensen's take via Surgical Meth Machine, "I want Rich People Problems!"
It kinda sucks that for the majority of jobs out there, you don't get to see your hours of labor translate to cash at the very end of the day, or even that week. Some jobs you can, but that's some real under-the-table stuff that I'm not sure I'd want to deal with. If you're lucky, you'll get it towards the end of the following week. But a lot of us poor bastards get paid bi-weekly, so we have to wait two weeks to get the money from that first week. Take for example, the fucking Labor Day that I had to work. Labor Day was on September 6th, and I got paid on Friday of that week, but that pay was for the work I did the previous two weeks, not that week. I didn't see the hours that I worked on Labor Day translate to money until this past Friday, the 24th. That's two weeks and five days, just two days shy of a whole three weeks! And then there are people who get paid monthly. I'm sure it's fine if you bring home about 3 or $4,000 a month, but any less than that would suck.
No comments:
Post a Comment