Though I have had mostly good experiences with this bank, I have one very important warning for people opening a checking account here. MSCU has something called "Courtesy Pay" that you can opt out of. Unfortunately this can be a big nightmare if you do not opt out of it. Basically it means that if your bank account goes below $0, whether because of a check or debit card transaction or a hold, and you swipe your card, the bank will let it go through. Great, but for each swipe of your debit card, they will charge you $37.50. That means that the $2.50 coffee you just bought is now $40.00. Many banks have this, but set a limit that they will allow the charge and fee up to $100 or $200. MSCU sets this courtesy limit at $1000.00.
I use the website often to check my balance. Unfortunately the website often doesn't show an up to date balance including holds. There are ways to find this, but it is not prominently displayed on the website. So my nightmare scenario was that the website showed that I had more than $300 balance. It did not prominently reflect a hold that was in effect. This was a hold that was released later (no charge in the end), but unfortunately it brought my available balance temporarily below $0. I used my debit card 19 times for small purchases (like coffee, McDonalds, etc.). 3 days later, I checked online, and saw that I got hit with $712.50 in bank fees, and I had a negative $710.00 balance. During that time, I had even gotten a deposit that should have more than covered the temporary hold on my account, but the multiple bank fees had already eaten that away so that I was still in the negatives.
To be fair, I must state a few things:
1) When I opened the account, they told me about courtesy pay, and the idea sounded okay or innocuous to me. They did tell me that I could opt out of it, but it is not until you experience this "courtesy" that you find out how much money you can lose. My fault for not thinking this through sufficiently and realizing the danger of this.
2) I now know how to find my available balance on the website. It is displayed separately in an area that isn't very prominent. My fault for not comparing the balance on the website to the balance in the available section of the website.
3) I live paycheck to paycheck, and that is my fault. I wish I had a buffer of a few thousand dollars so I wouldn't have to worry about this. If you consistently carry a large balance in your bank account, you shouldn't have to worry about this. Unfortunately I do not have a great financial situation.
MSCU is reversing a portion of the fees, but not whole amount. I am thankful of course for any amount that they reverse, as $700 will take me months to recoup with my financial situation. I have now opted out of the courtesy pay program. If I do not have money in my account, I want my card to be declined and I will take out my other bank card or pull out cash to pay or simply forego that $40 coffee. When I spoke to MSCU about this, it seems that the best solution they had was to give me a paper check register, so I can manually keep track of each check or debit card swipe. That is correct, but I would think that in this day and age of technology there could have been a way of issuing me a warning or something better than pen and paper. After the first $37.50 charge, I wish I had gotten a text message or had my cell phone set off a loud alarm. To date, I have not received notice of the negative balances or charges (neither snail mail nor e-mail), and only found out about them after I went online, which I do only every 5 days or so.
Again, I realize that I made a few small mistakes that ended up compounding to a huge nightmare. I now understand the danger of courtesy pay, and have fixed it so that it does not happen again. It just seems that getting charged more than $700 in fees for a couple hundred dollars of transactions without a warning is very excessive. Once again, most banks do this, but have a limit of $100 or $200 so that you won't get hit by more than 3 or 4 charges.
I'm working on bringing my account back into the positive range, but it will be a few months for me to do that without skipping an electric bill or phone bill or something else.
The reason for this review is not to slam MSCU. But it is to warn others. If you are financially well off enough to ensure that you consistently have a significant positive balance ($500 or more), you should not need to worry. But if you are the kind of person who occasionally has a low balance, my suggestion is to opt out of courtesy pay. read more
