Paul's Comments

The title of this article usually refers to living in an area where local sales of alcoholic beverages are prohibited, or maybe even consumption might be illegal, I'm not sure because I don't drink. And for the moment, I can't. But not alcohol, water.

As I mentioned, the property I'm living in was foreclosed. The old landlord no longer owns the place and I don't know to whom it was transferred or what they're going to do about it. In the mean time, as I said before, until someone does something with papers I'm not leaving. But we had a water leak, which has caused some minor flooding. Well, since I can't expect anyone else to fix the problem, I called a plumber. I discover it's going to cost $450 or so to fix. Ouch. I can't afford that. (Beside that, it ain't my place.) So I have the plumber shut off the main water, and bleed the pipes. That costs $117. One way or another, I figure I'll get that back.

Because of the law, the new owner can't throw me out, he's going to have to either give me notice, then file an eviction if I don't leave, which I will fight, or pay me off to break my lease. But if the place has serious water damage the county might be able to declare the place uninhabitable and thus have me removed. This prevents that possibility. I even had the electricity changed over so that they can't turn off the power; if they do, then I've got grounds to sue for what, at a minimum, is wire fraud since they'd have to call PEPCO on the telephone to do so. They'd be discontinuing a valid account established by a tenant; conceivably they could legitimately discontinue the former landlord's account.

I knew it was going to be expensive. Just wasn't sure if it was unaffordable but was prepared if, as it turned out, it was. I mean, what I felt was, if it was expensive, I'd pay it. If it was really expensive, I'd cry (or want to) and pay it. If it was unaffordable, then I'd have no choice and I'd do what I did; shut off the water and bleed the faucets so that we don't get either water hammer nor does the water freeze up in the pipes since by draining the pipes there's no standing water.

I would have screamed and gone to $250 if I had to. So, for now, I will call a water delivery company and get a truckload of water. All I need is water for cooking, drinking, bathing out of a bucket, and the occasional flush away of waste. Delivered water is expensive, but for a hundred bucks, if I had to spend that much, you can imagine how much bottled water I could buy; probably enough to fill the living room of the place. Anyway, if I couldn't have afforded that, I would have gone and bought some sort of storage system like a big tank or something, (cubic meter buckets from Home Depot are about $6) and sealed water that way, then asked someone for water by filling a tank from a hose for that purpose. Bad came to worse I could always boil water before using. Or microwave it, which would probably do the same thing.

In the mean time I'll just use delivered water. I can get a water cooler which does hot and cold water for $13 a month, and something like $10 a bottle. If I really was going to get a lot of water, I'd have gotten someone to help me and I'd have picked up a truckload of water from Shoppers Food Warehouse or maybe Safeway. For the short period I'm probably going to need to do this I'll pay the extra price for delivered water; I need it now and don't have the capacity to make other choices. This seems to be a reoccurring problem when you're stuck in a wheelchair.

Deer Park will be delivering on Friday.

Some good news, I used the corporation that I am sole director and officer to order the water, and guess what: I get a business discount! The Water Cooler is $10 a month and the bottles are less. So I ordered more bottles. (I'm figuring to have enough water around to last the better part of a month.) The only big part of the expense is the deposit on the bottles. I figure the difference alone on this one transaction saves me the $25 a year it costs to keep the corporation's charter active. Turns out it was a good idea to set one up four years ago even if I didn't know what I was going to do with it. I should have been doing this with anything I ordered where there was a possibility of recurring orders. Would have saved me on some problems. I think I need to find out about opening a corporate checking account, if I can find a bank that won't be too gouging on fees. I just hate paying $10 a month or more to put money away.

I pointed out to the clerk that charging a deposit on the bottle makes sense, and if dairies did the same thing as water companies there would be no need to have laws against stealing milk cartons. When they deliver water, they charge you for what the bottle costs. When you return the bottle, you get the deposit back. You basically own the bottle, and if you decide to convert it over to something else (like using it to store change), well, you bought it, so it's no loss to the water company.

If dairies billed stores a deposit fee, say $15 or $20 each, fully refunded on return, the stores would be careful to return the crates, or in the alternative, if someone kept it, the dairy would get a $20 deposit on a milk carton that probably costs them $3 in quantity to be produced.

On the Politics section I have decided to include an editorial written by Lasantha Wickrematunge, a newspaper editor and journalist for The Sunday Leader in Sri Lanka, and his prophetic statement that he would be murdered and giving clues as to whom he suspected would be responsible.

I first heard his posthumously presented words which were dramatized on a BBC World Service radio program and they shook me so strongly I cried. I cannot improve upon his words, thus I have decided to include all of the editorial, and I urge anyone who looks at this blog to read it.

I have moved this site over to a new service; if you read it before you'll notice it no longer has an ad banner because, now knowing how much traffic it gets, I can host it on a server I pay the charges for, and thus I don't have to use an ad-supported server to pay the costs. Only thing I forgot was that this was a vanilla (stock) installation of B2Evolution, which means the YouTube plugin wasn't installed, so the YouTube flags don't work to automatically embed content. I have to put that plugin here, which I shall do shortly.

I got a recommendation for a video on YouTube, and I watched it. This was one of the funniest videos I have seen in a long time. I wanted to recommend it to anyone. It's only 18 minutes, and it's teriffic. You can get to it directly at the following link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cbk980jV7Ao

But I liked it so much that I'll include it as an embedded video if you want to see it now:

This article is kind of rambling and probably should be split into more than one article because it deals with several issues all intertwined but I'm too tired to do it right now; I might do so later. Part of it was I wanted to get all of my thoughts down, so please excuse the length and breadth of the article.

After several months, I've been informed that (now) the State of Maryland will pay my Medicare premiums backdated to when I filed the paperwork with the state; that will increase the amount of money I get from my disability payment by a nice chunk of change. However according to what my bank says I have, either I've been dinged with about $400 in service charges for overdrafts - and I know I did not spend that much extra, I did keep count on what was in my account - or Social Security screwed up, sent me the refund of what Maryland has admitted that they will pay for the Medicare premiums I was charged for the last few months, and has failed to send me the normal check for December (which is paid in January) in addition to the refund.

Calling my bank's automated system seems to imply this; they show one deposit for the several months of Medicare premiums which have been refunded to me but does not appear to show a deposit for my usual Social Security Disability check. (Either that, or again somehow I've run over $400 in electronic overdrafts and fees and I do not believe I could have, I don't even think I've run any transactions.)

[Update 1/21/2009] Okay, I'll admit it, I did. My new statement came in and I probably spent over $200 that I didn't even realize. I see all the transactions and I recognize them, so I presume I made them But ouch, ouch, ouch over $130 in overdraft charges; a $35 charge for a $6 overdraft and another for an $8 one, plus some others. So except for on-line transactions where I have to use a card and don't have enough credit, I will no longer use my debit card; I now pay cash for everything. I'm also going to bring my credit card down to zero and use that since they will not allow me to run an overdraft. Also this practice must be irritating a lot of people, and banks spoiled it for themselves: the Federal Reserve is proposing a change to Regulation E, as I understand it, will forbid this sort of automatic "overdraft protection" and it's either going to require the customer have signed up for it or allow the customer to opt-out. Well, BB&T, you had your chance to get me to be a customer of your overdraft protection service, if this goes into effect your greed will cost you my business in allowing electronic overdrafts. At $7 it wouldn't have been as bad (although that's ridiculous for small overdrafts), but $35 plus $30 more if it sits for a week is ridiculous. Even Check cashing companies aren't that rapacious! It gives me 1/2 a mind to try something mischievous, like go to a store and try charging something to my Visa Debit Card that is way beyond what I have, say a $1500 computer and see what happens. Of course, before I did that I'd move my direct deposit somewhere else. [End Update]

There are two possibilities; (1) based on what I had and what I think I spent, I had a certain amount of money, and Social Security has send me the refund of the Medicare premiums backdated several months, and has not sent me my regular check; (2) they sent me the refund of Medicare premiums and my regular check, but based on what I have I had a -400 balance in my checking account which ate that piece. [Update]: I got through the voice menus, and that's exactly what happened; I got two deposit transactions the same day, and based on what I have now and the amounts they were, I must have had a -400 balance in my checking account; I have no idea how. [End Update]

And if that is the case, it's not because I bounced checks. It's something more sinister and worse.

I am basically sick and tired of a slimy and reprehensible practice from BB&T that I can't seem to make them stop. I would like my checking account to be hard stopped from running overdrafts as a result of an electronic transaction. If the transaction would cause an overdraft the transaction should be refused. The reason being that it would allow me not to overdraw my account and would not cost me anything.

But it's interesting how BB&T will allow me to run an electronic overdraft that, even if it's for $1.50, will cost me $35 and if it's not paid off in a week, ding me for another $30 on top of that. But they can't issue me a less expensive overdraft account which will only charge me $7. That wouldn't bother me so much, but no, my credit doesn't qualify me for that type of account even though they'll be happy to let me run lots of electronic overdrafts at $35 each.

Nor do I seem to be able to get BB&T to red flag my account or otherwise prevent accepting an electronic transaction - which they know in advance before they accept it - that is going to cause an overdraft.

It might even be arguable such charges are not lawful because of the general requirement to mitigate damages, and the simplest way to mitigate such damages are not to allow them in the first place. Further, state law here is based on strict negligence; if there is negligence in an accident or incident where damages occur, you must be 0% at fault or you're not entitled to collect anything. Here, their collecting of fees for electronic overdrafts is based on invited error; had they refused the transaction there would have been no monetary damage and no overdraft would have occurred. (There would also have been no fee collectable by them.)

Note I'm not talking about a bounced check or NSF (Non Sufficient Funds) fee. I have never bounced a check this century, over eight years now, at something like six different banks I've used. It's only when I used my check card to make a purchase that exceeded the amount of cash I had in my account. They covered and approved the transaction, this caused me to trigger an overdraft, and I'm also dinged an additional charge of $35 for the electronic overdraft.

If I was writing a check, and the check was presented and I had insufficient funds, that would be understandable, the bank has no way to prevent the check from being presented and they can either cover the check or bounce it at their choice, and in such a case it's my fault for bouncing the check. It's 100% my fault, and clearly it's reasonable for them to get an overdraft penalty.

However, in the case of an electronic transation, the bank has the last clear chance to refuse the transaction at no cost; they know to the penny exactly how much money I have in my account, they can refuse the transaction but they choose to allow it anyway because if they accept it they can get an extra fee. Thus the fault is also theirs, and according to our state's strict liability standard they should not collect anything at all. This is the same rule as Virginia and DC, so even if I ran a transaction in ATMs there or at a store, the same rule should apply.

Well, anyway, my current strategy is in two parts. First, while I'm still a resident of Prince George's County, I want to get an account with the Prince George's County Credit Union; depending on what the new owner of the building my unit is in decides to do about wanting to terminate my statutory lease, I may be leaving sooner than expected. Once I have a credit union membership I remain a member even if I would no longer qualify to get one.

So I'm going to take all of the extra funds out of my BB&T account above enough to cover usual automatic transactions, and open share and share draft accounts (share is savings, share draft is checking) according to whatever the credit union's rules are. And I'll ask if I can have my share draft account "locked" or "red flagged" (or whatever the term is) so that an electronic transaction that would cause an overdraft will not be approved (or in the alternative, do something like a sweep account.) I have enough time to also move the direct deposit of my Social Security check there.

If I can get them to lock the account so I can't run an electronic overdraft, fine. If they also can't do that, then I go back to BB&T and tell them to lock my account, (and then I'll watch my Credit Union account to not run an overdraft there) and if BB&T still won't allow me to force-lock my account from overages, I'll sue them over the service charges they've previously dinged me and try to get a court order to force them to lock my account or to have the charges declared illegal (and you can bet we will see that their supposed "inability" to prevent overages suddenly becomes possible to fix). I am sick and tired of being dinged for huge and egregious service charges. Especially as I'm a pensioner on a fixed income and egregious charges for small overdrafts they shouldn't have approved in the first place are ridiculous. If they try to argue their depositor agreement includes a clause using arbitration I'll try to get it struck so I can still sue as being unconscionable (because the amounts involved are so small and the arbitration fees are usually quite high) and because it probably can't allow for injunctive relief. And because the arbitrator is going to tend to favor the bank because they would lose business if they started supporting the customer in these cases. Too many of these arbitration cases favor the bank even when, as I see it, the win percentage shouldn't be so high.

In every single case where an electronic transaction caused an overdraft, had the transaction been refused, I had enough money on me that I could have paid the transaction in cash or I had a credit card I could have used. It would have also warned me I'd made a mistake somewhere (or the bank has, not all that hard) on calculating my account; I do keep a list of my transactions. When I run a transaction I save the receipt, then I enter it in my spreadsheet and it keeps count. I cannot figure out where the leakage is coming from; I keep having electronic overdraft transactions which shouldn't be occurring. If I couldn't overspend and triggering charges that benefit the bank, I might find out either I'm forgetting something I have legitimately run a charge for (probably the most likely case) or in some fashion someone is stealing from me either by running an unauthorized transaction or running a charge for more than I authorized.

But there still is no excuse for this other than greed by the bank; if it wasn't so profitable to allow electronic overdrafts, banks would have hard locked everyone who didn't purchase an overdraft plan a long time ago. I think someone said that NSF charges (back before they could do the same thing with electronic transactions) were one of the biggest profit centers of banks.

Well, anyway, if I could turn the checking account's "allow electronic overdraft" feature on-and-off I wouldn't fight them over it; when I needed it I'd accept the $35 fee and be done with it. The only other alternative would be - presuming there was a pay phone around - to call the bank every time I was going to do anything and check my balance. Or pay cell minutes to call their 800 number, which means any time I wanted to use my check card I'd end up paying 50c in cell phone charges to find out what my balance was. (They charge more than that to check your balance at someone else's ATM.) But even that might not be right, sometimes the electronic phone system doesn't record transactions which the network or check reception system gets. So I might still run an electronic overdraft for something that I checked on before I used it.

Another thing I noticed, BB&T has "improved" their statement by simply listing all transactions but it does not give you daily balances; when you get dinged for an overdraft you have no way to know why the overdraft occurred, you have to reconstruct the daily balance yourself. A big pain.

As much as I dislike HSBC for that slimy trick of charging me (or trying to, anyway) $59 for a Sears Mastercard they promised was fee-free, one thing they have done, more than once, is to refuse a transaction that would have caused me to go over my credit limit (currently $300) that procedure is one I actually appreciate, because, since they refuse the transaction, I don't get hit for an overdraft, I have no fee and I thus know I'm either at or too close to my limit. Maybe they think they're punishing me for fighting them. Actually, it's the best thing they could have done for me, and if I can't get a check card hard lock and don't sue, I might stop carrying a balance on the card, pay them off every month, and use them instead of my ATM card.

The only real reason I'm carrying a balance with HSBC is to make sure it's been on my credit record long enough to show up; otherwise I'd have paid it all off every month. I actually used to do that until I realized that by carrying a balance and paying a little interest I might actually increase my credit rating. It's only $250 that I owe them, just enough to be something so it will show up once I've had it around six months, and yet not enough to be dangerous. A credit card with a $300 limit is fine for me; a credit card with a $3000 or $5000 limit might be dangerous if I had a reason to use it. Although I had one, once. I saw this one company offering a business credit line and ordered it for my Sister, no annual fee. They approved her for a $15,000 limit, surprise. So I had them issue me and my brother tied accounts, and to make sure we didn't make a mistake, I set the limit low, no more than 3 times what we might possibly charge in a month, which was $3,000 for each of us. This way if I or my brother had to go get her something we could use her card, or I'd ask her if I had to charge something for myself personally. When I left, I gave her the card back, more-or-less same as if you turn in a company credit card when you leave a job.

It was rather funny in that it was her account, but she was telling someone on the phone the other day how when I was managing her bookkeeping she worried every time she ran a charge wondering what I was going to say to her about the money she spent! Hey, it wasn't my money, and I don't think I ever tried to be criticizing, it was more on the order of, 'This bill says you spent $1200 last month at Home Depot, is that right?' If I'm checking someone's books and finances to determine what their bills are and who gets paid, it's important to make sure the numbers are right.

When I get the statement from either my credit card or my bank, I can usually do a visual verify that it's right in about 15 seconds because I can remember everything I do. I'm not a busy person, I know the places I visit, I know where I've spent money, and I usually even know approximately how much I spent there. So I see a statement, and I see $25 from the transit authority (metro access tickets, okay). $49 at a dollar store (some goodies and sundries like trash bags, check.) $75 at Shopper's Food Warehouse (groceries); $12 at McDonalds one week; and a special case where I treated myself to Johnny Rockets once; and so on; all the charges in general I recognize, and then BAM! $35 for an overdraft and $30 for a collections charge because I can't get out to cover the overdraft because by the time they mail me the postcard to tell me I need to cover the overdraft it's been a week. Ouch.

And yet I can't figure out how come I'm behind when the numbers I have should indicate I didn't run an overage, in fact I should still have something left over. So I don't even know what I'm doing wrong.

Now, going back to the idea of either not allowing the Credit Union account to run an electronic overdraft or getting BB&T to stop, if you know me or you read between the lines, what I will effectively be doing is keeping one account that will allow me to run an electronic overdraft. In emergencies - especially back when I had no credit card - the ability to run a little extra over saved me from severe or unpleasant inconvenience, including once where I was able to rent a motel room vs. having to sleep in my (broken down) car as well as buying a one-way ticket on Greyhound. Call it maybe $150. I got called by the bank about it, I explained that two days later I'd be getting paid and my paycheck would bring me up to date, and the clerk said okay. I never complained about the two overdraft charges. Had they not approved it, I would have had to get someone to wire me money for the bus ticket or pay them for the ticket at another site and it would have cost at least as much if not more.

Which brings up another issue: money transfers or the equivalent thereof are expensive, at least for transfers within the U.S. It's like $10 to wire money to Mexico (actually that's for 3-day delivery; immediate is $14.99). Check how much it costs to send money or the equivalent within the U.S. and it's more than that. Sending someone $200 for immediate transfer will cost $23.99, and in 3-days costs $17.99 which is clearly ridiculous in either case. There's a lot of money to be made in (electronically) moving money where it isn't, and because they can get away with it, transactions where you have to get money or money equivalents to someone else not near you are often very expensive. If I go to a Greyhound station and pay at the counter for someone, the cost for Greyhound to issue a ticket is exactly zero. But they charge a "gift ticket fee" of $18, or at least they did for a fictional ticket for today from Denver to Philadelphia. (I also note that you can't find out how much the fee is in advance; they won't tell you unless you place an order.)

On another ticket, I made an example, it's for March from LA to Chicago. If the ticket is picked up at "Will Call" it's an $18 gift fee; if it's mailed, it costs $21. Okay, a $3 fee is reasonable for mailing; it's costing them money although it might be arguable that since they're getting the purchase price ahead of time, they're already compensated for float and all it's really costing them is the 42 or at most 83c to mail the ticket since the clerk has to handle the ticket anyway there's no real extra cost to them. But I won't quibble over $3. That would also be a reasonable fee for allowing a network ticket. But $18 is sheer greed. The cost of data transactions is near zero; the fact we get tons of spam shows that the cost to send an electronic message is zero. It is entirely possible to allow anyone to be ticketed electronically without it being an exorbitant charge - or really any charge at all - but they can get away with it so they do it.

If someone has any time, the simplest and safest way would be to buy a prepaid card or gift card for $5 or less, put enough on it to cover the transaction, make the transaction and mail them the card. Or if it's an actual prepaid credit card as opposed to a gift card, allow them to order it and the card company will mail it to them with their name on it. Net cost: $5 above the amount loaded on the card.

You just have to have enough time to wait for the card to be mailed to you, call it probably 5 days.

What it really comes down to is people who don't have the time to wait are hit twice, first because they have to get someone else to help them, and second, they get hit with an extra-high service charge because they don't have the time or capacity to wait.

Also, there is the nasty feature that prepaid cards (with your name on them) charge a $5 a month fee to keep them. And these cards for people with bad credit - e.g. as bad as my credit is, theirs is worse - they'll get a card with a $200 limit and over $100 in fees! At least the worst HSBC was going to ding me for - until I called them on their slimy attempt - was $59.