Bank of America changes "rules" for California customers. CAUTION

[Alan Mendelson]

Bank of America has made some changes for California customers and because of the changes, you might find new charges on your bank statement and you might find some new inconveniences too.

I called BofA this morning and was told that California customers will now be treated like the rest of the bank's customers nationwide. What does that mean? Well in my case, the following:

1. My daily limit on ATM withdrawals was reduced. This actually was not a problem -- when I called into the bank this morning a service rep immediately readjusted my daily withdrawal limit.

2. I used to be able to use "foreign ATMs" (those are ATMs that BofA does not own) without a Bank of America charge. Now, I am charged $2 per transaction by BofA plus whatever the foreign ATM charges.

I also ran into another problem on Friday night. I made a cash withdrawal on Friday night that was equal to my new lower daily ATM cash withdrawal limit. I made the withdrawal at 9:38-PM here in California. But BofA recorded that transaction as 12:38-AM Eastern time. So when I tried to use my ATM card again this morning, the ATM said my daily limit had been reached.

When I called the bank and told them of the discrepancy the service rep recognized that my account is showing Eastern times when in fact it should be showing Pacific times.

Unfortunately, since I needed cash, I had to make a "point of sale transaction" and that cost a hefty fee to get the cash.

The BofA service rep filed a "claim" for a refund for me and on Monday I am supposed to call their claims department to follow through. It wasn't my error -- it was the bank's. I should have been able to make another cash withdrawal without any added fee. B of A owes me a refund. I will let you know what happens on Monday.

I'm not happy about the changes. I'm especially not happy about the $2 "foreign ATM" fee that I now have to pay. It used to be very convenient using any other bank's ATMs and only incurring a fee from the other bank. But now Bank of America is going to ding me in addition to the other bank.

[Alan Mendelson]

New info from B of A today:

From now on, California's ATM calendar day will be based on Eastern Time, so that means at 9-PM a new "withdrawal day" begins.

[Rob.Singer]

B of A....I dumped them two years ago and I'm glad I did. In fact, I stopped using conventional banks just because no matter how many years or decades and how loyal we were to them, as soon as they found a way to cheat us out of a few bucks here/a few bucks there, they did it. For instance, if you have $900 in your checking account and go shopping with multiple charges to the tune of $935 while forgetting to transfer more money in, they'd run the largest charge first so they could get the maximum number of overdraft protection charges out of us--even if the largest charge was the last one we made.

On the CC side, AMEX is no different. I had the same (platinum the last 15) card for over 25 years, and I averaged at least $10,000 a month in usage on it for a long time. Well, when I quit professional gambling I traveled a whole lot less, meaning no more full time rental car and much less gas. So what do they do? They impose a $6500 limit on me, and I only discovered it when I tried to make airplane reservations to take my family to Hawaii for our annual visit, and was DECLINED. So I called and asked them to get rid of the limit but they said they wouldn't because of all the hits they were taking from the recent financial crisis. I dumped them, and because I suspected all banks were now doing similar limitations, I went to a couple of secured cards, but dumped them after all THEIR stupid fees started showing up.

Now I only use debit cards, and they can't mess with those. I get a gov't. pension from my ten years of working for them, and that goes to their own fee-free debit card. My wife's and my regular pensions go to a pay pal debit card for $4.95 a month. And our 401k's also go straight to it whenever we pull anything out.

They say there's more risk with debit cards, but in two years time using these things for a large amount of online shopping, fuel, hotel check-ins and such, not a stitch of a problem.