Bouncin' for Jesus

My hubby's been so busy with Back-to-School planning that he accidentally gave our tithe twice last week. I found it a little humorous when I thought about going back and asking for one of the checks back.

The thing is, he didn't realize it until he took a break from school orientations and teacher work days and all the school's board meetings to check our online account, which he usually checks daily; both the checks had already cleared at that point. We couldn't even "Stop Payment" to Jesus. :0)

All in all, it wasn't bad--we took all our budget cash we hadn't used yet (we're on the Dave Ramsey plan) and put it back into the bank, so that extra tithe cost us some groceries, clothing, cosmetics, blow money, kids' allowance, eating out and entertainment for the next five days and we only actually bounced one $4.60 debit swipe; however, that swipe ultimately cost us $38 in insufficient fund fees. Apparently, we have such upstanding credit with the bank (how that happened, I don't know) that they continued to let us swipe that debit card even though we didn't have the funds. The kicker is, our account isn't so important to the survival of the bank that they thought, "Hey they're never overdrawn, maybe there's something awry here, we should inform them today!" As a matter of fact, we JUST TODAY finally received that letter from them, informing us of our deficiency. That's exactly one week since the overdraft happened. Thank goodness my hubby is anal about checking our account.

So, this is how I interpret the bank's actions:

We were a little worried about YOUR money's safety so we took a look at your account after you overdrew your funds. We found that you responsible people have enough ethics, and just enough income, to possibly get your bank account back into good standing (and still pay us overdraft fees...first). We'll be underhanded enough, legally of course thanks to our big money lobbyists and expensive lawyers, to take advantage of those ethics by letting you have a negative balance and still keep swiping so that we can get paid by Visa and also get $38 more of your money to invest back into Customer Service training. If enough customers keep a negative balance, soon we'll pay our tellers enough to smile and say, "Next, please" instead of "Helloooo, I'm open (you idiot)" and our lines will be shorter than 50 people at Noon on Fridays, when we all, especially Managers, take our long lunch breaks. Maybe we'll even open our doors at 9a.m. as posted, instead of 9:15, therefore alleviating our customers of late arrivals to dentist appointments. Have a nice day and have a yummy, green lollipop!

And when did Overdraft Protection become an option, not the norm? I don't know, I thought banks were there to protect our money while we allow them to invest it and make money for themselves. On the contrary, it seems that it's now a priviledge to use the banks services and we should bow down and kiss their feet at such a priviledge and beg for Overdraft Protection?

Sure, I was a little peeved about the whole thing, especially after sitting for twenty minutes with a four-year old that they tempted with crayons but no paper to color on. Maybe they expected us to purchase that also. We did NOT--I let him color on their nice, shiny, colorful, expensive flyers offering customers Overdraft Protection and all those other neat little "perks". I think we colored on about $38 worth. I told him to make sure he colored both sides. :0)

My hubby worked on them for awhile and I think we got our $38 back but not b/c we threatened to take our "large" balance somewhere else. They just snickered at that threat.

Now that I've blogged about it and let it all out, I feel much better.