“Frakkin’ banks”
First let me say that this is not a return to regular posting, this is just a random rant.
Banks, I’m not a big fan and becoming less of one with each passing day (er, payment). I am currently trying to pay off all of my credit cards. The first on the list is a Citibank Visa with a starting balance of about $1000. After selling some stuff at the used bookstore, I had an extra $115 to put down towards my balance. As soon as I got home I logged onto the Citibank website and tried to make a new payment. I received the following message:
You are permitted 4 online payments per billing cycle. You have already made 4 payments totaling XXX.XX this billing cycle.
My immediate response was WTF!? I can only make 4 payments per billing cycle? How dumb is that? I should have known there was a limit, because on my account page it was tracking the number of payments I was making per billing cycle. I like to make payments each time I get some cash in the bank, this prevents me from procrastinating and spending the money elsewhere. If I get $80, I go put it in the bank and then immediately transfer that money to the bill I’m wanting to pay. I was outraged when I attempted to do that with my $115 yesterday. Luckily, my last payment was still pending, so I quickly canceled it and added the $115 dollars to that and resubmitted.
As is common these days, I vented my frustration to Facebook by posting the message I received from Citi along with a big ole Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, and received a few comments. One was from my friend Jason:
Yet you can send as many checks as you like…which require far more resources to process. It makes almost as much sense as when an online payment isn’t credited to your account for 3 business days. Frakkin’ banks.
I guess you can see where I got the idea for this post’s title. This actually gave me the idea that I should send them a check for $10 every day for the next 20 days (which would pay off my remaining balance), but this would be wasteful and vindictive and there’s probably some obscure paragraph in my card user’s agreement that prohibits this (probably right under the paragraph about only getting 4 online payments per pay period). Since my payment cycle is up tomorrow anyway, I decided that I would just wait, pay the balance in full and close the account as soon as possible.
Another friend’s comment got me to thinking a bit deeper about the subject of banks:
yet it is a convenience .. Therefore the banks see it as a way to make money.like they are doing you a favor
Yes, it is convenient for me to pay my bill online, but it is equally convenient for the bank, if not more so! To do it the old fashioned way, they have to send me a paper bill, which costs the money of the bill itself and the postage. I have to send them a check back, again via the mail. Someone has to open it on their end and manually process the payment and do the data entry. With online payments, they send me an email and notify me that my statement is ready. I go to their site and make the payment, doing the data entry for them. The payment is debited from my account automatically. The only human doing anything in this transaction is me. The only thing it cost the credit card company is the bandwidth (probably a penny or less) and the cost of their IT infrastructure, most of which would be their anyway even without online payments. There is probably some small transaction fee, but I can’t imagine it would be very big and are offsetting considering payments go both ways between each bank (i.e. Bank X probably has a similar amount of money transferring in from Bank Y and it has transferring out to that same bank).
The gist of this is that Citibank ain’t doin’ me NO favors! In fact, all the favors are coming from me. I did them the favor of choosing them for my business (a mistake for many reasons). I’m also doing them a favor by saving them the money of sending me a paper statement and doing their data entry for them while paying my bill online.
This really boils down to a business deal, and a poor one from my end. Citi is charging me money so that I can spend money that I do not have. This is completely stupid and the more I think about it, the stupider it sounds on my part, and the more unethical it sounds in general. Banks are like the drug pusher on the street corner and we the people are like the addict trying to get our fix. The pusher doesn’t care what the drugs are doing to his customer, the pusher just keeps on selling more and more of his stuff until he completely owns that addict. And that addict keeps coming back for more and more, because it takes more and more to get his fix. In the same way, the bank will loan you more and more money so you can buy more and more stuff, none of which you actually own. Before you know it, you’re hip deep in debt and using one credit card to pay another and there aren’t enough years left in your life to pay all the debts. And if you croak, the pusher moves on to the next addict and the bank does the same thing.
The good news is that we don’t have to keep following this same path. Just like the addict can give up drugs and clean himself up, we can give up debt and clean up our finances. For both the road can be long and painful, but in the end both will be better off. For me, I’m heading down that painful debt-free road now. It’s going to be a journey of several years, but it will be worth it and the lessons learned will be good ones. And it will eventually allow me to live a more peaceful life without as much worry and frustration.