Banking - Be Careful About Bank of America's Account Closure Policies

[This post is written and copyrighted by FIRE Finance (http://firefinance.blogspot.com).]

We had a Regular Savings account with Bank of America which we closed in August 2006 after our move. Generally, as a part of a good habit and book keeping purposes, we keep confirmations of all bank account closures. We do so either by saving the emails from the bank or requesting the related bank to send us a letter, confirming that our account had been closed.

Nevertheless this month we received a monthly statement from Bank of America for the closed savings account with a monthly maintenance fees of $3.00 charged to the account since the balance was $0! We followed up the statement with a call to Bank of America's customer service. The representative was extremely friendly and helpful. He told us that according to Bank of America's policy we would continue to receive statements for our closed accounts for 60 - 90 days after the closure. But we should be careful to notice the charges on the statements. If there were any monthly fees that were charged to our closed accounts, we should immediately call them (i.e. BOA's customer service) and have it reversed. Else the charges might add up and go to a collection agency if we do not pay them. That would definitely affect our credit history!

No kidding, that is a serious implication. Immediately, we requested him to credit us the fees charged on our account and double checked to make sure that he had indeed credited it. Hopefully there would not be any more statements from BOA and even if there is there should not be any monthly maintenance fees charged on a closed account.

We hope this experience of ours helps our readers to be careful when they close their BOA accounts. Also, please be aware of the charges afterwards (that might be charged to a closed account during the period of 60-90 days after the closure) and if there are any, call early and have them reversed.

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