Complaint Review: Wells Fargo Bank - Nationwide

You made a few truthful statements...

"There is nobody to blame but me"

"My fault. I should have paid more attention."

You are right on BOTH counts

But then this statement gave me hope....

"At least I dont procrastinate about financial matters anymore"

Until you stated this....

"and I did learn to check my bank statement every single day."

Just out of curiosity, what did you do to manage your bank account before computers and on-line banking? Did you go into the bank every day and ask "Hey what's my balance"? Did you do the same thing and write out checks without knowing how much you had just hoping it was enough?

Of course not(or at least I hope not), you most likely kept a written register. So if that (presumably) worked for many decades why would you change now?

I will admit that checking your account every day is a step up from what you were doing, but that only shows what the bank has received. If you have made any transactions (such as checks, ACH transactions, or even debits that didn't get submitted to the bank yet) the bank doesn't know about it and it will not show you what you really have available. This is why a Written Register where you write down every transaction as you make it is the best way to go.

Even if you switch to a "small credit union" they will charge you fees for Overdrafts, yes it may be less. But if it is only $1 is too much if you can avoid it by just managing your account.

As for the fees...

It is impossible to tell you exactly what these fees are as we do not have access to your statements, but I can just about guarantee you that it does show exactly what these fees are and if you have someone at the bank claiming they don't know what they are...ask to talk to a manager.

However, I can give you an idea of what the fees MAY be.

First the $12 OD fee is most likely the transfer fee from your savings to cover the Overdraft. Now, they charge this per transfer and they transfer once a day to cover all of the overdrafts for that day. So if you have 3 overdrafts on 1 day they charge $12 if you have 1 overdraft a day for 3 days you get charged $12 a day for a total of $36 in fees.

You stated you had 8 withdraws from your savings for $25 each. In looking at their terms, $25 is the MINIMUM they will transfer from Savings each time, so this tells us another thing. That most of your overdrafts were small, and you had at least 8 of them. Where at $12 a piece that comes to around $96. As for the $35 for overdrafts, based on what I think you have, that should not be charged UNLESS you don't have enough money in your backup account to cover the overdraft. Or these were fees that were in place before you started with the OD protection.

But the key here that this is nothing "special" WF is doing, just about every bank has basically the same processes and terms.  They didn't force you to spend more than you had available.   Had you not overdrafted then they wouldn't have taken any fees.  You will also find that most of the other reports about WF and many other banks are from people who have FAILED to manage their account.   In fact if people would actually take the responsibility and minimal time to manage their accounts probably 75% of the reports on this site would be gone.