Banking Affairs

Don’t you hate it when you get bank charges due to late credit card payment fees or account fees which you could’ve waived?

Well, I’ve recently signed up for a NAB Gold Banking which has unlimited withdrawals from any ATM around Australia and the world free of charge. The catch is, you either pay $12 monthly bank account fee or deposit $5000 per month to waive that fee.

The problem is, I got charged $12 for December’s fee. I absolutely hated that. Why? Well, I put in my application in late November and was only able to get my bank card almost 6 weeks later. Why on earth would I deposit money during that waiting period if I couldn’t withdraw it out?

Not only that. The biggest downside to NAB banking is that I had to pick up my bank card from a NAB branch since they won’t post it to my house. Apparently I live in a “high theft” zone. You gotta be kidding me. I live in such a quiet and well civilised neighbourhood.

To add to my frustration, they sent my card to the NAB Liverpool branch which is like 30 minutes drive away from my house. Did they even apply logic that they should’ve sent it to my nearest branch? Eventually they did though when I pointed out the flaw in their decision making.

Anyways, after my whining and whinging, I finally managed to get my $12 bank fee waived.

So, here comes another one. I flew to Malaysia on the 2nd of January for my holiday and due to my limited Internet access, I discovered my credit card bill was due and I’m late by like 4 days.

Couple of weeks later, I discovered that I’ve been charged $25 for a late fee. I was quite upset about it and steeled myself to resolve it when I got back to Australia.

So I went to the Commonwealth bank branch in the city during my lunch break and explained to them my situation and asked if, out of good faith, that they could waive my late fee since my history with them over the years have been good as I’ve always paid my bills on time.

Luckily there was this asian bank teller who was helpful enough to pass on my message to the branch manager since she was in a meeting. However, the initial Indian teller I got wasn’t helpful at all and didn’t seem determined to satisfy my resolve.

Anyways, today I got a phone call from the same Asian guy saying that the branch manager has okayed it and that I should be receiving a debit of the late fee to my account within a few days.

Awesome how they value customers like that. Little did they know that if they didn’t debit the fee to me, I would’ve cancelled my card and gone with someone else.