Their conduct to you is disgraceful! And as it happens, they're my bank, too. And have been since they were Nation's Bank. But I'm dropping them now.

God, here it goes again. I never open an account without making sure it's insured so why should I bail out anyone stupid enough to put their money in one that's not? Sigh. The sad thing is I know they'd stop bailing out these irresponsibile assholes about the same time I throw my hands up in the air and give up on being responsible because I'm so sick and tired of paying for other people's mistakes.

Funny isnt it how the market corrects itself, regulation is bad and socialism is the tool of satan.

Until businesses and campaign contributers have a down turn, the they have to be regulated, have the market corrected by forcing everyone else to cover their losses.

Quite frankly if these companies profits werent shared with the public why should the public have to cover their losses?

I never open an account without making sure it's insured so why should I bail out anyone stupid enough to put their money in one that's not?

Some accounts aren't insurable, such as some of the money market funds. Then the other problems that some are running into is that the individual account limit to be insured is limited to $100,000. If the account had $171,000 in it, then only the $100,000 is insured and the rest is swinging in the wind.

The next thing you ask is "Why would anyone have more than $100K in a single account?" The answer being that something such as an IRA makes more money by having it all in one giant account in one bank rather than having it in two different accounts in two separate banks.

I'm so glad to hear that, Patrick. If you or anybody else is dropping them because of what you've learned I've gone through, please drop an e-mail to the head of the bank, Kenneth D. Lewis at ken.d.lewis@bankofamerica.com, and copy me, if you don't mind: adviceamy at a o l dot com

Additionally, people should realize that customers like me are being made to pay in the case of Bank of America. I guess, instead of having procedures to verify ID -- and I can only imagine they don't really have them, since this was allowed seven times in various branches in Texas and California -- they just have the consumers pay in time and agony after their accounts are violated.

lujlp above has it wrong, I'm afraid. Individual retirement accounts are insured up to $250,000. Consumers may actually have several hundred thousand dollars of FDIC- insured deposits at a single financial institution by assigning different qualifying beneficiaries, putting some money in joint accounts, etc.

Moral of this story: if you actually have a single penny at your bank that is NOT covered by FDIC insurance, then you haven't been paying attention and your personal banker hasn't been doing her job.

Sorry, I meant Jim, not lujlp

Julie B.

You're right for the IRA's. My bad, I popped that one off the top of my head. In general, excluding retirement accounts, that if your combined total of checking, standard CD's, savings and such held against on tax id is limited to $100K.

FDIC website.

Until recently, if you were/are a mildly rich ($200K+, I wish ;-) ) single individual, it is hard to hold the money in one institution without breaking the limit somehow.

Banks have been getting better about it, but it still wasn't easy.

Jim, your point would be what?

If you don't want to forgo the interest, you know you're running the risk. If you have over the limit (lucky you! am I supposed to be weeping at your bad luck here?) and don't break it up amongst several financial institutions/accounts, then my ass (that will probably never ever have $100,000 in its lifetime and if I did I'd buy a home with it) is supposed to bail it out because your penny pinching ass doesn't want to forego some extra interest making sure it's covered?

Read my mind on that one! In case you can't, I'll flip you my favorite hand signal.

Jim P -

Sorry, but I don't honestly care if someone chose to put their money into uninsured accounts to make more money. When you do that you are taking a calculated risk that your money will be secure. If it works out (which for decades it has without a hiccup) great, you come out way ahead. But if it doesn't, why does it suddenly become my job to bail you out?

I dream of someday actually having too much money to keep it in an uninsured account. I am struggling to make my bills and occasionally put something into our savings. On rare occasions, I have to tap our savings to cover the bills and then have to struggle to replace it.

And quite honestly, this whole debacle was caused by a massive passel of fucking morons who decided that property should be a traded commodity. This artificially drove up the price of housing until owning property was out of reach of people with modest incomes. Neighborhood after neighborhood priced out of the range of people who would live their. Driving the cost of housing through the fucking roof.

But lo, the market crashes and crashes hard. Suddenly house prices are actually dropping as the market corrects itself from an untenable position. Relief is in sight for a lot of folks who fifteen to twenty years ago could afford to buy a house on their income (adjusted for inflation) but then got priced out of the market. Except it's not, because the government is probably going to bail a whole lot of people out and keep the price of houses from sinking very much.

So while I can barely keep my head above water and work my ass off to make sure I do, I am supposed to help keep greedy assholes who knew they weren't going to be able to afford the payments, stay in their houses. And I'm supposed to help out people who took a risk and lost a bunch of money in the process, lose less of it. Sorry, but it doesn't fucking compute.