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Banks Deserve NSFs: Treat Them The Way They Treat Us
From the back room of YouThinkWhat, the newly created banking and financial writers’ department has come up with an idea that we believe will suit all us regular John Q. and Jane Q. Public consumers.
This idea has been a long time coming, but we believe the time is now to implement this policy for banking institutions who require our money to stay afloat.
It’s time consumers exercised the Golden Rule toward the bankers in order to trump the *Rusty Rule. That’s the rule that has been used against us as we go barreling toward the financial brick wall.
NSF charges for banks…just like us they will owe forever…banks are ruthless about NSF penalties…in your face about how you should know better…well they should know better!
You know how when your account is short $2 for a transaction of $20 because the bank has rearranged the way it pays debits from your account; or you just didn’t make it over to the bank in time to deposit a hundred dollars? You know what happens next. It’s an all too familiar scenario. $35 NSF. That’s $35 for insufficient funds or as the NSF acronym states “Not Sufficient Funds”. As a courtesy they pay the transaction. The bank does not return the item to whomever presented the debit because if you don’t get to the bank within 24 hours to top off your account they’ll make more money by charging another $35 overdraft fee, even though you did not ask them to pay off the debit.
Now you’re indebted to Sniti-bank or Skank Of America or any of those others institutions who tell you, “We treat your money like it’s our own…..” What is left unsaid is that once you deposit money into their care, It Is Theirs! Ever try to find out your bank balance without having to give your blood type or your mother’s maiden name and her blood type? But anyone who has your account information and the bank’s routing number can drain your account all day everyday and into the night until BOA’s Ken Lewis comes home.
We think for the billions and billions of taxpayer dollars the banks have received they should be required to pay–and this is better than a stress test–an NSF and an overdraft fee.
After all isn’t that what they did with the loans they made? They did not have enough money. They over extended themselves. They made bad investments with poor returns. They should pay us just like we’ve had to pay them.
We think for every billion dollars of bail out money a penalty of $350 million should be levied against their accounts. It’s as outrageous as the banks charging $35 for something that probably cost them less than $1.00 the first time it was set up to run by computer.
*The RUSTY RULE: “Do unto others, in a predatory, malicious way, before they do unto you”. So named because when humans are pierced with a rusty metal instrument the result can be toxic.
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