Elanso

Hot on the heels of my warning about closed credit cards comes my own personal experience with a phantom savings account with Bank of America.

Yesterday, I opened a letter from Bank of America that turned out to be a bank statement for the savings account I closed 2 months ago. This savings account was only earning about 0.2% interest and I had to keep a $300 minimum balance to avoid a “monthly maintenance fee“. I decided that $300 dollars was worth more in my ING Direct Orange Savings account (get $25 referral here) so I closed the account.

When I closed the account, it was halfway through the month, so I was worried about how the would apply the interest earned during the first 2 weeks. They said they would just turn off “Keep the Change” and send me a check for the final amount (which I received).

Unfortunately for me, the final interest payment kept the account open without me knowing. Additionally, since the account was below the limit, they charged me a $3.00 monthly maintenance fee. Therefore, I was in the red $2.99 (after the $.01 interest earned) and I wouldn’t have known unless I looked at the statement. See, since I closed the account, it was removed from my online banking dashboard so I couldn’t check on its status.

Resolution

So I called up Bank of America’s customer service line, waited about 15 minutes and finally got through to a customer rep. The girl was very nice and quickly resolved the problem. She refunded the $3.00 charge and offered to send the $.01 check to me. I declined since I didn’t want to 1) waste my time and money driving to the bank to deposit a penny and 2) didn’t want to waste the paper to get it. See, I’m environmentally conscious!

So once the $3.00 gets returned to the account, it will be officially closed…or will it? I might just call back next month to make sure.

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