Home-town banking

Dear Manager,

This is to inform you that I will be ending my relationship with your bank. I have had accounts in the building where your branch now resides for over 25 years and I’m 25 years old. My parents opened one for me before I was born.

The bank on Main Street has gone through many incarnations in those 25 years, having different names with many cycles of employees and I’m not sure that the information to prove my long-term allegiance even exists.

But I remember how cool that big vault door was when I was five. I know exactly where you were sitting when we spoke on the phone and have sat in the chair across from you on various occasions in my life. And, I’m absolutely to blame for the situation I find myself in. I should keep better track of my finances and the overarching moral to this story is to balance your checkbook. Had I been more on top of things, this wouldn’t have happened.

Two weeks ago, I cashed a paycheck on a sunny Friday afternoon and was shocked when I looked at my printed computer receipt. My account was $900 overdrawn. Strange, because the day before I had a few hundred dollars. I raced to a computer and saw that four checks I had written in January had all been cashed on the same day, July 16, totalling $1,100 I hadn’t accounted for. (Two to an old health insurance policy I no longer have, one to Con Ed for money I didn’t owe, and one to my student loans at New York University.)

I am surprisingly unlucky in that all four checks seem to have gotten lost for the exact amount of time. I had repaid them not realizing and then, not knowing I was overdrawn, I continued to use my shiny Visa Check Card and racked up $240 in overdraft fees, half of which were for the old checks.

I was on the phone with customer service, not knowing what had happened and they told me that they could do nothing, because nothing was wrong. I had written the checks and they were cashed. Had I balanced my checkbook, it would have been fine. Lesson number one.

“We can give you $60 back,” the woman in the call center said.

My health insurance said that I had paid them for a policy that no longer existed. They refunded the money. Con Ed said they had received what I owed them once at the end of March and again when the missing check arrived. They refunded the money.

“It really has nothing to do with us,” a bank representative in a tie at the Broadway and Eighth Street branch told me. “You should have cancelled the checks.” Lesson number two.

But you were my ace up my sleeve. Someone in my hometown, someone who could maneuver through corporate banking and understand that what was needed was small-town familiarity. Someone who could find it in their heart or in their interpretation of procedures to understand that somehow something odd had happened.

You were the hero of that fantasy; you were the person who would listen, give me the benefit of the doubt, fix it if you could, or at least be sympathetic. But you gave me the same $60 that they had offered me on the phone. The random person in the call center was at least nice about it.

And you’re totally right. I’m lucky that I’m getting anything back. And you have rules to follow. At the same time, in the turbulent economy we now find ourselves, a few months after your very same bank needed a bailout from the U.S. government and its taxpayers to the tune of $20 billion for not balancing its checkbook, you could have taken a moment to investigate this situation with me. Instead, you told me going back through my monthly statements wasn’t “feasible.”

All in all, these were fairly painless lessons for me. Many are not so lucky. Many people are losing jobs and houses. They, more than me, deserve the ear and the assistance of their local branch manager. And here is lesson three: there are consequences for our actions and we can learn from our mistakes.

I’ll balance my checkbook and perhaps the next person who needs small-town care in a corporate world will receive it.

- Zac Stuart-Pontier