When we first lived in Chicago we banked with Harris, simply because that is who H and her family dealt with. Upon moving into downtown Chicago we noticed you could never find a Harris Bank when you needed one. They gave us the run around on a few other things, notably trying to pay a Canadian bill I still had. I also wasn’t big on the fact they didn’t have online bill pay at the time.
We moved to Lincoln Square and found ourselves even further away from any Harris ATMs or branch locations so we made the switch to Chase, formerly Bank One. We never had a single issue with them, they had ATMs all over the place and their online banking system is the best.
Fast forward to our relocation to Los Angeles where the only Chase ATM is at Disneyland, and since I am not buying a season pass to the Mouse so I can do my banking we were once again faced with changing banks.
We settled on Bank of America for a few reasons, most importantly they are huge and all over the place. So no matter where we live next I know there will be some type of BofA branch or ATM near us.
But things haven’t been smooth sailing … H’s ATM card came with her named misspelled … They were supposed to transfer money from our Chase account to our BofA account when we set things up but that never happened … H can’t always get her debit card to work … My card wouldn’t go through the other day when I tried to order in … And most importantly we have been juggling our finances through two accounts since April.
I think we have all our bills switched over, at least I thought I did until the car payment was taken out of our old account the other day. This resulted in our first ever NSF charge which I am not happy about. Some background – We’ve been using our new BofA account for everything and H’s paycheck is deposited in there, so the Chase account was used the few times we couldn’t use our debit card with BofA for some reason. There wasn’t a ton of cash left in the Chase account and we kept a small amount in there just in case. I called our auto loan company last month and gave them our new account information, but they still pulled from Chase the other day. That didn’t put us NSF but the two pending charges on the account will – simply because our BofA cards wouldn’t work. Called the auto loan company and they claim we never changed the information. I know I did because I spent 10 minutes trying to find a number to call them. They won’t pick up the NSF fee, and neither will Chase.
Actually, Chase did have a solution and that was for me to deposit some money back into that account. And where did they want me to do this?
Disneyland.
Bank changing sucks.