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| - I have to say, this experience in January of 2015 was perhaps one of the worst ones I have had in my life. I visited this branch on the first day in January that they were open to pay off and close a HELOC that had with them for about five years. I was greeted relatively promptly and I told them "I would like to pay off this loan and close it. How do I do so?" It seemed that this is a rare occurrence, so it took some consulting by the manager to figure out the process. They couldn't do it by check, so I had to transfer money into my checking account via wire transfer and then come back the next day to close it out. This part of the transaction took about an hour.
I traveled home that day, called up my current bank of choice (USAA) and they transferred the money immediately. I opened my online summary the next day and the funds were in my BoA account... "Fantastic!" I exclaimed to myself. I then got in my car, drove down to the branch and told them I was there to close my account. It took about 45 minutes for someone to help me so I waited patiently. I was greeted by a branch manager who told me it would take a few minutes to complete... so I waited about an hour and they finally put me back in-line to finalize the account and close it out, and in the process, I wanted to close out my checking account and finally be finished with BoA. They informed me that they had closed out and paid off the account and that I had transferred too much money. I left that day with about $500 in cash and the thought that I was finished.
Fast-forward to March of 2015. I was greeted by a text from USAA that my credit score had changed so I went in and looked at the report and lo and behold, my credit score dropped from 820 to 740. Upon further inquiry, all three credit sources had shown that I was delinquent in paying my HELOC from a period of January 2015 through March of 2015! I gathered my intel and went back to into the bank to find out how to correct it. I have to say, the people at this bank are very friendly and were very apologetic but the problem unfortunately still existed as a result of something not being done correctly. They then directed me to call the toll-free number as the matter was now out of their hands since the accounts had been closed.
I then spent a total of about 10 hours of my time on the toll-free numbers over the course of the next two weeks trying to figure out what had gone wrong. At first, no one would help me and they kept transferring me to collections agents. After that, they finally took a deeper look and apparently, the branch manager I worked with had incorrectly credited the payment upon closure and they showed me owing an extra $235 which e bank, hoping for answers. They informed me that a mistake had been made and that I would have to call was the sum and total of a month's payment. On one hand, it was worth fighting for the principle of the issue but at this point I was just tired of the process and wanted to get this behind me.. so I made the payment to them in an effort to move on. I had to physically go back to the branch to make a payment to an account that was already closed, so that entailed several more hours of effort on my part to get this accomplished. I work about 20 miles away from that branch so much of this had to be completed during weekend hours when the phone support for the branch was closed... so that was a feat in and of itself.
The final straw in this saga was when I asked the branch manager for an escalation to see if I could get BoA to send a note to the three credit bureaus to get this fixed. It took several days for this area manager to call me back and again, she was very apologetic. She did take some time to look into the issue, but in the end it was a case of "sorry, can't help you, either with the monies or with the credit hit."
In the end I have to look back and reflect upon my 23+ years of banking history with Nations' Bank and ultimately Bank of America and I think about how things could have gone so badly. I have had multiple mortgages, car loans, IRA's and millions of dollars of direct deposits shuffled through that bank. In the end, the relationship was ended over a $235 error on their part at the branch. I think that the nature of banking is that, big banks like BoA are looking for customers to broaden their portfolios with the bank and in the end, these sorts of errors are deal-breakers for people like me who know that things can work much better than what I have been presented with. I wish the best for BoA but I think that their focus has been upon developing transactional charges rather than long-term relationships and investments.
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