As a young adult, I have seen too many times a friend or acquaintance of mine being stuck with large amounts of overdraft fees on their checking account. Overdraft fees have a tendency to snowball. It’s not unheard of to see a overdraft in the morning and by days end have over $100 dollars in charges on a account.

A friend of mine happens to work for a major national bank and had some tips on what to do if you get hit with the snowball effect of overdraft fees.

Call Your Bank

• Do this right away. Many times people assume that they are powerless to reverse or protect themselves from overdraft fees and do nothing.
• Once you finally get through to a real person, explain to them that you did everything you could to prevent any overdraft fees. Tell them you checked your account balance regularly online and tried to only use debit transactions.
• Also explain to them that your teller had told you to check your ballance online because it supposedly updates automatically.
• Finally reassert that you don’t know how this happened and that you tried to do everything you could.

There is no guarantee that the customer service associate will be able to or be willing to reverse the transactions, but for 3 overdraft fees totaling over $100 dollars, it’s worth a shot. Often times they will not all be reversed but perhaps reduced to a reasonable amount.

Remember banks make large amounts of money from people not standing up to these outrageous fees, but also remember that you should keep a written track of how much money you actually have and actually spent. We can’t rely on a digital balance that may or may not include all of our transactions.

The real lesson is to not let banks take advantage of you. If we are responsible with out money and aware of our funds, we can’t fall victim to these tactics. We can blame the bank for the size of the fees, but we can only blame ourselves for causing the fees.

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