Chartered Banks, Arrogant Dictators?

Banks, just plain bug me.They think it is their right to dictate how and when you can withdraw your money! You are not the customer, to be served, you are the sacrificial lamb to be striped of your money in anyway they demand. Want a loan for a car, go to them on bended knee. Think you can buy a house, better check with them first. Want to deposit a cheque, expect them to put a hold on it, no matter what your history is with the bank. They just don't care about you.

Here is my example. I got a cheque from a company that is not my employer, but they are a huge company that happens to deal with my bank. I go to deposit the cheque into my account, and they tell me that they HAVE to put a hold on the cheque. They know the cheque is good. They know I am a good customer, but they still HOLD the cheque for 5 working days. How can they justify that in this day and age? A cheque clears within a day, banks still feel it is their right to hold your money for 7 days. If this would have been a pay cheque, I would have been screwed! The teller and manager both told me that it was perfectly legal for the bank to hold a pay cheque even if they knew the company had the money, and it was a valid cheque.

In the days when I worked for a bank, if a person worked for a company and they came in with a cheque from that company, we would honour it as long as the company had the necessary funds. So what has changed? Have banks become dictators with your money? I think so, that is why I dislike them so much.

What made me even madder was the fact that a teller, by accessing my account told me who I worked for, and obviously knew how much I made, and how much I spent at my nearest Giant Tiger. Why should she have access to this information when all I was doing was depositing a cheque?

When you go into the bank, the teller should be blocked from accessing your account details. They do not need to see that you had a salad from Wendy's yesterday. All they need to know is that you have an account there and that you have the necessary funds for whatever you are doing.

Canadian banks are dictators. They follow their own rules and make you conform to them. They care nothing about you, or your history with the bank. I switched my mortgage out of the TD Canada Trust Bank, and three months later they called me asking how satisfied I was with my mortgage with them. That is have clueless the big chartered banks have become. They care nothing about you.

Banks need to get competitive. We need to stop going into the banks on bended knee to apply for a loan. We need to hit them where it hurts, mortgages. If you borrow 300,000 from them to purchase a house, you end up paying 900,000 or more to own your home, this is gravy to the banks. They do nothing to earn the money, but they reap the rewards, and their shareholders smile.

Stick with the credit unions, when you walk in there, they actually know your name, you are not just an account number. The chartered banks are arrogant because they think you have nowhere else to go but to them. If you do go to them, they become dictators of what you can or can not do with your own money. Most disturbing is that a minimum wage teller can access all your financial information.