Please! Just Close My Damn Accounts!

 I suppose it is because I was a banker for eight years that I like moving money around. It is fun to me. I have always had little of it to move but that which I did and do have is good mental exercise for me…and I need all I can get.  My wife and I have all our accounts at Capital One.  About six months ago I opened checking, savings and credit card accounts at Discover. She was a co-signature; I am not having an affair or dealing in arms or drugs.  I just have fun moving the money.  There is a new breed of bank:  online only, no brick and mortar but offering the ability to wire money (no fees) between banks, deposit checks via the cell phone and no longer use paper checks because of “bill pay” (electronic payment of bills).  Cash machines (if one selects carefully, no fees) and debit cards render the lack of a brick and mortar presence a non-issue.  

I did have fun, moving my meager fortune around, adopting some household bills to pay via the bill pay system and paying the credit card in full each month (I have had credit cards for 45 years and have not once paid interest on a balance).

About 4 months ago I learned online that Discover would no longer accept donations to the Kyle Rittenhouse defense fund.  I did not know that Discover even had a go-fund-me type of operation.  That day I started to clear up all debt and move any money left over back to Capital One. Avoiding supporting “woke” institutions is difficult but where I know that culture exists I do no business with the company.

I “chatted” with a wonderful Discover Employee.  Come to think of it, I don’t know that she was wonderful, I just assumed she was otherwise Discover bank, hell bent on delivering the finest customer experience as all banks have us believe they do, would not have hired her.  By this time my accounts were empty (wait patiently for it…quite a bit further in this article) and I said in this chat I wanted to close all my accounts and why. Discover seems to archive all “chat” records I learned.  In any case I was unambiguous “close my accounts.”

About two months ago I received an alert via my Capital One credit report (?) that a $16 charge had been posted to my Discover credit card and I had missed a payment.  Not possible since the account had been closed for approximately five months right?  That was my guess. I was wrong apparently.  In any case I did nothing; let Discover “eat” the charge.

A delightful surprise, because I love how the banks like to keep in touch with me, I received an email from Discover, from whom I had not heard in months (and I missed them terribly), that I had missed a $16.83 payment (the sum of the charge which included a little charitable interest).

No dice; I was clear that I had the account closed.  However I entered into a chat with a faceless employee - we will call her “Addy1.” I explained the situation and told her to look at the past chats on my account.  Lo and behold, she can’t find them. She said if I logged in to my account I might be able to find the archives there (odd since the companies usually have more information than do the customers).

Log in? Are you shitting me?  I don’t know my user name; I don’t know my password. I don’t know my account number. How do I log in exactly?  Addy1, bless her heart, said if I provided the email on my account she could send me a temporary password.  I did; she did not.  I asked her again and the results were the same.  At this point I tried to log in myself because, much to my surprise, my user name showed its face.  I ran through the “forgot password” routine and was given a temporary password  That worked; I never did receive the passwords dear Addy1 was going to send me.  I entered, changed the password to something other than the hieroglyphics that make up these temporary passwords.  

Yea!  I am in the account.  What do I see?  $.38 balance in my checking which I had closed I thought, no doubt a gift from Discover in the form of interest.  Wait!  I also have a savings with $.23 in it. Discover, in its generosity, credited my savings account $.23 for some rewards. Maybe it was “stimulus” money. Now I have three accounts to try to close.  I DON’T WANT $.23 or $.38; take those as a gift showing my appreciation! JUST CLOSE THE DAMN ACCOUNTS!  By this time Addy1 left me even though she (per my request) promised to stay with me until all my work was done. But bless her heart, she reappears under the same name (is it not discriminatory to hire only people with the name “ADDY”?  In order to deal with me she needs all the information I had given to Addy1 to get the chat started.  I am not going through this again.  I pour myself another drink and devise a scheme. I thought, cleverly, being a solution-oriented guy who does not take “no” for an answer, I would move the $.23 and the $.38 (total of $.61) to Capital One, (I cannot wire FROM savings so I will first move the $.23 from savings to checking and then move via wire $.61 to Capital One; then move $16.83 back to Discover, pay the credit card bill and THEN close all three accounts, hoping against hope that my small deductions to the checking and savings, retrieved by Capital One, resulting in zero balances, would cause the accounts to close..  Discover, in all its glory, said they did not do wires for less than $25.00. $.61 was a no-go.  Having had several drinks now and a Xanax because of a particularly rough day, I did not break down or hurt anything.  Instead, I thought I would move the $16.38 less the $.61 Discover really wanted me to have, from Capital One to Discover via wire and then pay the card bill with the $16.38 I had moved less the $.61 Discover had been protecting so faithfully for me. 

Simple; perhaps not ingenious, but simple, right? One would have thought, but wrong. Capital One informed me (this is not my beef, just a part of the discussion) wire transfers were not possible until I verified the recipient.  The process  makes sense, actually, one of the few pieces of this project that does.  Capital One sends two deposits to Discover, each for less than $1 so clearly I am not going to abscond with them.  When I see those I am to verify them with Capital One which then knows it is safe to send a wire.  So on the prayer that Capital One does not have a $25 minimum,  I will wire the money I owe on the Discover card, less the $.23 and the $.38. When the wire is deposited in the Discover checking account I will then pay the balance of the card and write them a chat which I WILL PRINT backing up Discover’s tenuous chat storing capability, telling them to close all the accounts and NEVER bother me again.  Now, let’s say Capital One won’t transfer less than $25.  I will transfer the $25 from Capital One to Discover, pay the card and create a “bill pay” to ANYONE (other than Joe Brandon or Andrew Cuomo) for the balance and hope that clears before any other transactions hit my account.

Two days later, at my request, Capital One verified my Discover account with a $.21 and $.35 deposit.  When these were made I was to return to Capital One and verify the numbers, which I did.  Whew!  Now I transferred the $16.83 from Capital One via wire to pay off my card, zero my checking and savings accounts and be done with Discover for the rest of my life.  Almost, but not quite.  I was under the impression that once Capital One verified my accounts it would debit my account for the amounts it had deposited.  I know the bank earns well but it was beyond me that they would let me have that money.  I was wrong.  

So, I returned to Discover, paid off the credit card bill but still had the $.61 in my checking account. What am I to do with that?  The bank would NOT let me do a bill-pay to myself for $.61; it actually told me that but of course, did not say why so I might correct something.  I decided I would take a risk on another chat, hoping to not get Addy1 or Addy2.  I got Michaela this time and for the first time in this tortured history I was dealing with someone who was knowledgeable, helpful and friendly, even after I told her I was closing my accounts and why.  Bless her heart, she said she would mail me a check for $.61 OR make a donation to Make-A-Wish.  I donate to that organization anyway so I was fine with that.

 
Now there was only one more thing to do; she had to send via telephone (not text) a 6-digit number I was to relay back to her. That would authorize her to close the accounts.  I thought that was great. Whoops.  I have call blocking and it was turned on.  I remembered that but not quite in time. I apologized to Michaela and asked if she could send one again (in the meantime I did turn off the call-blocking).  She did, I verified the 6-digit number and she CLOSED MY ACCOUNTS.  I am not all piss and vinegar.  I gave her a five-star rating, told her in the closing text how much I appreciated her help, empathized with her because she deals with jerks all day (I am not in that class) and wished her a Merry Christmas.  She offered me the same and we are now off on our ways, her at that awful bank and me in my happy retirement.

I confess I am very much afraid to return to Discover online and see that my accounts were closed.

Recently, Brandon, the stupidest, cognitively deficient and most malicious president we have ever had nominated an avowed communist (literally) from one of the Ivy Leagues to become Comptroller of the currency.  This woman did not want to admit it but had been caught in her publishing swearing at banks and saying the government should be the only banker in town; in other words, it would have the ability to see what every single American does with his finances.  This woman escaped a perjury charge because Ted Cruz, Jim Jordan and John Kennedy (LA), had her published articles in front of them.  This horrid person, Saule Omarova, a Cornell University law “professor”, was rejected, even by a few democrats. There is little to my point here except that I believe banks are dangerously political and no more interested in customer service than Vladimir Putin is in maintaining a democracy in the Ukraine.  It is a shame that someone as radical as is this horrid “professor” is the best pick Brandon can find for a very important appointment. Banks need serious overhaul in my opinion (Please, please, pick me!!) but to make them disappear in favor of a government “managed” commercial bank is the end of financial privacy…and that was her intent. Certainly she could have selected subordinates from DMV’s of many states to help her run it effectively and efficiently.

I am now a happy camper; my accounts are closed. Michaela likes me and told me so and I look forward to my next battle, my pending small claims action in Suffolk County against the board of directors of Kensington Gardens Owners Co-op, of which I am a member and lessee.

Merry Christmas my friends.  Let us hope 2022 brings some sanity.

I doubt it.