WoodForest National Bank Totally Unethical Champaign, Danville, Illinois

I will just start off and tell you that you will have people come here and tell you that you are 100% right and the bank totally took advantage of you.  They will throw out a bunch of things on how banks are changing.  The problem is that no matter how many regulations are changed, how many procedures are put into place.  If you refuse to manage your account, you will have issues.  They may even try to playcate you telling you about several lawsuits that are out there.   What they won't tell you is that the couple of suits that went anywhere got each member of the class enough for a nice dinner on the town.  So while I am sure that there assurances are something you want to hear because it will make you feel better, it won't help you now and unless you change your ways it won't help you in the future.

So this may be a shock to you but it is YOUR responsibility to manage your account.  If you are not a poster child while there should be some required "money management" class.  I don't know who is.  The only one who knows what you have spent, when you spend it is YOU.  The banks systems(ATM, Phone, On-Line, Teller) only know what has been submited to them.  Very often merchants may take 2-3 days before it gets submited.  So unless YOU keep track of that you actually have less money than you think,  thus increasing the probablility of you overdrafting.  How do you keep track of your purchases.  You use a REGISTER.  Then as you make a transaction you write it down and subtract it from your available balance.  As long as you don't go negative you won't overdraft.

Now if you are like some people who are lazy and want to blame everyone else for their mistake, you are probably thinking that keeping a register is too much work, or it takes too much time.  Well if you think 30 seconds is too long, let me ask you this.  How much time did you spend out of your day going to the ATM EVERYDAY to check your balance?  How much time have you spent since then dealing with this?  I can guarantee you that both of those is many times greater than the amount of time it would have taken you in the first place to just take the responsibility and manage your account.

While you have not totally screwed yourself for the next 5 years, you have made it a lot tougher on yourself. You are able to open an account at a bank, but just like people with other types of bad credit you are going to have to pay a premium to what are known generally as "Second Chance banks".

To get back to the main stream banks.  You either have to wait ChexSystems out, hoping that the bank doesn't decide to sue you, or pay the amount you owe.  Will paying them get you out of ChexSystems..No.  But it will update your record as paid, and several major banks will allow you to open an account if your other account is paid off and it has been a period of time(such as 1-2 years later).

When you do get another account be sure to "opt-out" of overdraft protection(this is one of the new regulations).  That will basically a way to limit the posibility of overdrafting your account.  Not that you still can't, so it does NOT remove the responsibility of you managing your account. 

Good Luck and you may want to still seriously want to look at a money management class before you open another account up.