Teh 5/3 dramas
A few years ago AEI began offering HSA health coverage to employees.
If you aren’t familiar with HSAs, sorry, but they’re too much work to describe here. The short of it: Anthem, or health care provider, didn’t offer the savings account portion of the HSA at that time, so the savings account was handled through Fifth Third (hereafter referred to as 5/3, even though I would consider that “Five Thirds”).
Flash forward to a few months ago, when apparently Anthem began offering their own savings accounts to go with their HSAs. It must have been cheaper to do that, because our company decided to switch. I can only imagine what a colossal PITA this was for those involved, but the short of it was that in August, all of the money was transferred out of my 5/3 account and into the new (Lumenos) account.
This was fine and dandy except for one thing; they didn’t close the 5/3 account. So at the end of August, my account when from 0.00 to $3.82, because of interest. And it remained open.
Now, this is a minor deal except that they wanted to start charging inactivity fees of $2.95. Calls to the 5/3 employee responsible for this transfer came back unanswered, because he had just recently quit. And nobody else was able to handle this.
I called 5/3 last night to take care of it, and they told me I had to physically go to a branch to do this. Ugh. So I did, today at lunch.
It wasn’t too bad for noon on a Friday. I stood in line and got to the cashier, who after a few minutes informed me I needed to see “Gloria” over at another desk. So I went over there. Gloria was with a couple already. So I sat down in the seats near Gloria.
The people she was helping were a bit upset. Turns out, they had a CD with 5/3 and it auto-renewed (for 3 years). They missed the grace period because they had just moved to Columbus from Texas and their mail was being forwarded, and they just got the notice today. I don’t know how many days late they were.
Anyway, neither Gloria nor the branch manager were able to do anything for them. “We don’t have the power” was the mantra of the day. Irate, the couple asked how much the penalty would be for widthdrawing today. $1482.
Yikes! That’s 6 months of interest, so they have roughly a $40,000 CD.
The ma nwas fuming mad. The woman was pretty mad too, spouting off “I’ll never bank here again” and “This is fraud” and stuff like that. I didn’t really feel that 5/3 was doing anything too wrong, but they certainly weren’t backing down to appease this lady.
In the end, the lady decided to take the penalty and close the CD. This was the dumbest thing she could have done I think, but whatever. She must have needed the money.
WHile waiting, another guy came up and stood in the same area. He looked like he had been sent to see “Gloria”. Gloria asked if she could help him, and he needed to close his account as well. Turns out, they wouldn’t let him cash his check. It was a payroll check from a local business, but they wouldn’t “cash” it because he didn’t have enough money in his account. They would only cash it as much as he had in his account, which was $50. He needed the cash, and since they wouldn’t give it to him he was going to go elsewhere. Some kind of new policy to help combat check fraud.
Yikes *2
Fuming mad lady finally left and I got to move ahead with Gloria. When I explained the situation she was very nice and quickly got everything into place, even giving me the $3.82 in cash as opposed to some kind of printed check. Meanwhile, check casher decided to leave and go elsewhere and come back another day to actually close his account.
Dunno if this is typical for a Friday at the 5/3, but it was certainly enough drama for me for the day.
October 24th, 2007 at 1:55 pm
we used to do all our banking there. Now we are taking our buisness elsewhere also because of some of their tricks. I had been banking there since elementary school.