Discover has sent out an e-mail to Checking, Savings & Money Market account holders notifying them of a positive change. Starting May 7th, 2018:
During each calendar year (January 1 through December 31), if one of your Eligible Accounts is subject to one of the Eligible Fees, we will apply the Eligible Fee and then credit your account for the first Eligible Fee that would be applicable to your Eligible Account. For clarity, each Eligible Account is allowed one, and only one, Eligible Fee to be forgiven per calendar year.
Eligible fees are as follows:
- Excessive Withdrawal Fee
- Insufficient Funds Fee
- Stop Payment Fee
- Money Market Minimum Balance Fee
Basically this means if you are charged one of the above fees you’ll be refunded the first fee each calendar year. I like changes like this, everybody makes mistakes from time to time and it’s nice not to be punished too much in the first instance.
Hat tip to Travel With Grant
Every bank does this – often more than once… Believe me, I’ve done it. I’ve done everything from apologizing for a random overdraft – to also demanding BoA give me paper checks without a fee or I would withdraw all my money right in front of them to take to another bank.
Every time they always bend over, which is what they should do – the fees are absolutely ridiculous.
Related, but not Discover. Called into long time personally used regional bank once and asked for overdraft fee to be reversed. They did it,but decided to treat me as a child and lecture me about the importance of tracking my spending so not as to go over. Did not appreciate the lecture. Proceeded to draw my bank balance down to 0 and went into the regional bank to physically close the account (could have done phone, but had another purpose in mind). Went up to supervisor that lectured me and requested to close my account. When she asked why, I told her that I had opened 15+ bank accounts that year and netted well over $3000 in signup bonuses and wouldn’t be needing the hassle of her bank. She look flustered, but didn’t say anything more. That was all I needed. Ha!
In my experience almost any time I have had a fee from a bank after calling and asking politely they have waved the fee but YMMV
Immediately upon reading this it sounds negative. Most of the time when I call to waive a fee, they waive it regardless of whether a fee has been waived in the past. It sounds like they will only waive one fee a year now.
Very nice consumer friendly change.
EDIT: After reading earlier comments, maybe not?
It use to be the case that you would get an email alert if one of your accounts was overdrawn. This allowed for same-day reaction to transfer funds (from another Discover account) and avoid the fees. The feature is still there, but I no longer receive such emails — in fact, I received the alert email 2 days after the overdrawing occurred the second-to-last time this happened.
This is not a good change at all. In the past, it was the unwritten rule that they would waive up to 3 fees per year. Now, it’s documented to be one only.
Once I accidently did a ton of ACHs from my savings account and racked up 3-4 of those $15 fees at once. They reverted them all. This change is a big negative advertised as a positive.
As people mentioned above, this isn’t the most positive change, as customer service has been pretty lax with reversing fees, including doing so multiple times per calendar year. This change results in only one being allowed, which restrains CS from being more lax.
We have no idea if this affects CS behavior or not. Calling this a negative change is crazy.
The terms you listed on the post are pretty clear: “For clarity, each Eligible Account is allowed one, and only one, Eligible Fee to be forgiven per calendar year.”
Since it doesn’t state that only one eligible fee is automatically forgiven, but instead, says more broadly, that only one fee can be forgiven, it’s reasonable to infer that CS is affected by this as they are now held to explicit terms compared to before.
I disagree, we will see who’s right 🙂
It’s nice for them to be automatic about it. However on the flip side now they’ve made the T&Cs ample clear that your second and subsequent fees will not be waived, so they don’t have much leeway if you’re in that position.