Yeah, I'm running late on the whole move your money thing. It's been on my to do list but I never got around to it and then Wells Fargo waved the monthly checking account fee for people with qualifying direct deposits (which I had) so I put it on the back burner and then spaced it off again content to let the status quo prevail. Silly me...
Today after I made a deposit and did some shopping I came home and opened up my online access expecting to see my monthly direct deposit had showed up, balance my checkbook and prepare to pay bills. Whenever I log in it always takes me to my brokerage account page first and I have to click through to get to my checking account info. Now to be clear when I say brokerage account it's really kind of a joke. I sold all the stocks I inherited almost a decade ago to open a restaurant that subsequently failed. I had a left over penny stock which had split 1 for 11 a few years back leaving me with exactly 100 shares of a stock worth around $2 and a small amount of money in the money market fund. I hadn't used it, it was under $1000 and I really had been ignoring it thinking it was my rainy day fund if everything went totally south.
Then, today, when I logged in I noticed my cash balance was a a red number with parenthesis around it. It wasn't massively under zero, but it shouldn't be negative at all. I had a small balance in the account... whoops... guess not, turns out they've been charging me $150/year to sit on this minor amount of money and this year that finally cratered the money market fund below zero. I honestly had no clue. Maybe I was told this when I opened the account, but have no recollection of it, it was 7+ years ago. That's to some extent my fault, but it still sucks that these people are sucking me dry for doing nothing but sitting on a small amount of money. I'll take some of the heat on that one, but tomorrow, I guess I get to call my broker and have the stock shares sent to me and yell a bit more. Maybe I'll get a small refund, but I'm not holding my breath. I honestly thought this account acted like a savings account and helped hold off monthly checking account fees. Silly me, they've been charging me more on a yearly basis to hold my worthless stock than it's been worth and I let them take $1000 of my money by not paying attention. Still it's one more way they screw the little guy. Hopefully my failure and loss can act as a cautionary tale to other small investors or people sitting on small brokerage accounts - make sure you're not getting sucked dry.
Honestly though, if that were all that happened, I probably wouldn't be writing this diary, but it's only half the story. After slamming down the phone on the worthless advisor who kept repeating, "it's a brokerage account" as if that justified them taking all my money, I clicked through on the website to my checking account activity. When I pull that page up, lo and behold, there at the top of the transaction list is a $7 monthly fee - the one they aren't supposed to be charging me, because I have a qualifying direct deposit. So I pick up the phone and call them back. Needless to say it took a lot of effort not to start screaming at the new guy who answered the phone and, to be fair, quickly refunded the fee. Still the reason for the glitch is something everyone who banks with Wells Fargo need to be aware of. The fee registered yesterday and my deposit didn't came in until today, so since I hadn't had any direct deposits since the last monthly fee got waved, they hit my account for the $7. If I hadn't checked, I'd have just been SOL, just like on my brokerage account.
Anyway, this is the final straw sometime in the next few weeks, I'm going to open an account at a credit union and then move everything there. I urge everyone else to do this too if you haven't already and if like me you have a monthly direct deposit that holds off the fee demons, make sure you check closely for glitches like this. They don't care and it's up to us to watch these corporate bastards.