Today, I found out that citibank has hidden fees. They have revised thier checking plus service which is a feature that, when the offered it to me they said there were no fees. It acts like a credit card, where if you write a check and there isn't enough to cover it, it pulls from the checking plus. Well, now they charge 10$ per overdraft, and also interest on the amount overdrafted. News to me. What's worse, I use the bill payment feature and ran into the overdraft situation. It seemed to work, whre it pulled money out of the checking plus. But then there was a discrepancy of 10$. I almost didn't notice. After emailing citibank, they now "corrected" the problem by adding this line to my list of transactions.
| 02-05 | OD PROTECTION TF FEE | $ 10.00 | $ 26.66 |
Where before there was nothing. It just goes to show you that if you don't take a snapshot (using hoversnap or other screen capture program) You are up "***ts creek". I urge that everyone who uses online billpay and other online services to make sure you have hard copy proof. This doesn't mean just writing it down like in a check book. It means getting the Reference number. By law every transaction must have a Reference number. I save those in a text document on my local hardrive, and then I back that file up onto cd. In citibank they offer a snapshot at the end of your online usage. Save that onto your local hardrive. In the internet browser, you can save html page or simply cut and paste into a text document. I've had to use them also. If you don't get a reference number like this.
10-03-2008 CITI Checking: XXXX234 20351 $ 23.00
The bank will say, that transaction isn't in thier records, and never happened. They won't be liable for any late fees you get from a missed mortgage payment or credit card payment.
The other thing that this procedure of saving reference numbers is to confirm that the bill payment system did register your transaction.
Just fyi. THey own the servers, they can add stuff whenever and claim you were in the wrong, and you can't prove it because you don't have a snapshot image of the problem. Be smart.