I’ve Paid For This Twice Already…

I thought I was finally done with Wachovia

And maybe I am now. Emphasis on the maybe.

This originally was titled “Will the nightmare that is Wachovia never end?” but I’m feeling slightly more charitable now actually sitting down to write it. Maybe all the #1 in customer satisfaction commercials have penetrated my brain. Ah, the power of advertising.

A few days ago I opened my mailbox to an envelope from Wachovia that looked suspiciously like an Annual Fee Invoice for my IRA. An IRA I closed a month ago and moved to Vanguard. When I opened it, indeed, Wachovia wanted $75 for the priviledge of servicing my account for another year. But my account is closed. So… well….

I called Wachovia and after a ten or so minute wait got a nice person on the phone who said I was correct, my account is closed, they have no idea why I was invoiced and to ignore the letter. Good deal.

I got his name just in case. Wachovia and I have a history.

I didn’t originally open my IRA account with Wachovia. I started with a small local company, and then that company was bought by Prudential, so I was part of that for a while. Then I think part of Prudential merged with Wachovia. Or something. It was never quite clear except that I was now a customer of Wachovia and my account now had an annual fee.

Well, okay. I wasn’t so pleased about the fee but that is not why Wachovia is on my list.

In 2003 I moved from one apartment to another. I dutifully notified companies I did business with of my new address. I don’t *particularly* remember talking to Wachovia. I thought I did, but I will not guarantee I did. But my statements started coming addressed to my new place of residence (not a post office forwarding sticker, my new address was on the statement itself), so it seems like I might have. About a year after my move, I got a statement that said my account now had a value of $0. $0? What?

So, I panicked, I hyperventilated, and I called them up. After talking to about 15 people, someone told me that my account had been moved to “unclaimed and abandoned money” because they had a letter returned to them from the post office. A letter that a year after my move they had apparently sent to my old address. Even though they had been sending my statements, including this $0 balance one, to my new address. Huh.

The man I talked to said I needed to send them a letter saying this was my address, I had not abandoned my account, and it would be recovered. He promised that was all that needed to be done.

Not.

I did so, sent first class with delivery confirmation, and got ANOTHER statement of my $0 balance the next month. So I called again. And this person claimed to have NO RECORD of my previous call, said that my letter was discarded because it was not notarized so there was no proof I wrote it, and that I would have to deal with the state they abandoned my money in. Oh… no. Nuh uh. I cried and screeched and cried and demanded supervisor after supervisor and called back and talked to more people and three days later I finally got someone to say that if I sent them another notarized letter it could be rectified. With a very large emphasis on the fact that somehow, *I* did something wrong here.

All I did was trust Wachovia to take care of my IRA money.

Anyway. So at that moment, I decided I was escaping Wachovia as soon as I could figure out how. It may have taken 3 more years, but I did it finally. I think.

Because they may still be looking for “their” $75.

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