N3Roaster's Journal: I Made Money on Twitter

Late March I checked the balance of my accounts with TCF Bank and I noticed something a bit odd. There was a "Monthly Maintenance Fee" in the amount of $9.95 on one of these accounts. This is something that I had not seen before on an account which had not charged such a fee in the more than a decade I'd held the account. I thought this must be an error. After all, what could they possibly be maintaining at a rate of $119.40 per year? I had a couple paychecks that needed I needed to deposit, so I went to the bank and asked about it. The explanation was that they were trying to keep money going into the bank and produced some bizarre requirements to avoid this surprise fee, but what it really came down to was that it's a fee for nothing other than TCF Bank being greedy and thinking that they can get away with pulling a stunt like that. Having established that they were out to screw over a long time account holder, I closed all of my accounts and took my money to Educators Credit Union.

While all of this was going on, I posted the story on Twitter (you can follow me @N3Roaster if you want). Yesterday, I found in the mail a VISA gift card with a note from ECU thanking me for tweeting about firing TCF and going to ECU instead. The gift card was for $10, which puts me ahead on this by 5 cents. I guess it is possible to make money on this Internet thing after all.

That's old hat for TCF

[damn_registrars]

I banked with them a long time ago, and they were very good at finding clever ways to screw me over (hell, they never did send me my "free checks" for my checking account). I don't even remember how much of my money they took from me for various obtuse reasons but I know I don't miss them. It's a crying shame that the naming rights for the U of MN football stadium were sold to those weasels.

By chance do you know what they are charging for overdraft these days? If they are increasing at the rate they we

Re:

[N3Roaster]

I don't know what they charge for overdraft. My usual pattern was to just make sure I had enough in the account to cover automatic insurance payments and put everything else on the credit card (for the points, balance paid in full to avoid interest). Maybe that's the problem. I wasn't generating enough fees for them so they needed to come up with a fee for nothing to make sure that I was. One of the bank employees told me that this was done to get money going into the bank, but at least in my case it had th