Rekiwi's Blog

I've spent my life avoiding Bank of America.

My dad hated BofA for its consumer-hostile policies. He held old-fashioned beliefs about banks, that they were supposed to pay you interest for the privilege of holding your money.

BofA was one of the first banks in our experience to understand that the consumer needs the bank, with its checking accounts and credit cards and effect on credit rating, more than the bank needs the consumer. BofA started charging us for the privilege of accessing our own cash, charging fees for accounts below a certain threshold, and generally screwing us at every opportunity.

Of course BofA led a banking revolution, making buckets of loot for their shareholders and execs.

Imagine my chagrin now as I write more and more checks to Bank of America.

Years ago, we got an affinity credit card from our alma mater, UCSC. It amused us to carry a credit card sporting a banana slug. The card was issued by MBNA, the pioneer of affinity cards.

MBNA was gobbled up by BofA. How bad could it be? We would just be sending our payments to a different address.

Then the calls started rolling in. As a new customer of BofA, we had a universe of services and products to purchase and damned if they weren't going to ring our phone until we bought something. Sometimes we'd get three calls a day.

We emailed our alumni association and learned that telemarketing was forbidden according to the terms of their deal with BofA.

How typical. Bending or breaking the rules may outrage some folks, but what's a few pissed off people compared to the money to be sucked from this vast new pool of virgin customers?

And on another front, our original mortgage was sourced by North American Mortgage. They turned into Homeside Lending, which was acquired by the now defunct Washington Mutual. Then we refinanced and wrote our checks to the infamous Countrywide Financial. Countrywide was swallowed by Bank of America. Perhaps she'll die.

I know. It couldn't've happened to a nicer company. My first impressions of Countrywide were a sales pitch that screamed about the tens of thousands of dollars we could save over the life of our mortgage if we simply enrolled in their biweekly payment plan. They would automatically take money from us every two weeks and we would end up $70,000 richer in 30 years... all for the ridiculously low price of $350... plus an extra $1 per payment as a convenience fee. So we'd pay them $350 plus $26 a year for 30 years to do something that we could do ourselves by just making an extra payment a year or adding a little extra principal to each regular payment. It's good to learn that the company that holds your financial future has your best interest at heart.

And only now people are getting their tits in a tangle about scumsuckers like John Thain doling out $3.6 billion in bonuses to Merrill Lynch employees just before their acquisition by BofA and AIG filling the bonus trough with $165 million for the very piggies who helped bring capitalism to its knees.