Few things have struck terror in my heart like those 5 words above. I downloaded my transactions into Quicken this morning only to find that it didn’t updated my BofA accounts. The explanation given by Quicken was “Your account has been closed”.

Thinking that perhaps Quicken did not know what it was talking about, I logged on to the banking site only to find that my accounts were not listed on the main screen and that attempting to go to the Bill Pay tab informed me that I had no accounts with which to use this feature.

This freaked me out just a bit because I had used an ATM yesterday without incident. Did someone somehow get my info and close my account because of that? I have to pay rent tomorrow, what if someone stole all my money?! I was hoping for a glitch, but fearing the worst, because I have a credit card from BofA that was still listed under the accounts—it was “merely” the checking and savings accounts that were missing.

A call to customer service and some of the longest 8 minutes of my life on hold later, I found that most of their computer systems had gone down and that was indeed the reason that my accounts did not appear online. I logged in just now and see that all is again as it should be, with my accounts existing and containing their proper amounts.

But seriously, in this age where everything is electronic and one rarely physically touches the money they have, it is a bit freaky when it disappears in an instant, especially with the horrible tales of identity theft. What would I do if thousands of my hard-earned dollars suddenly disappeared? I could use credit cards, but what about when those came due?

That thought is horrifying, but luckily one I don’t have to fully realize at this moment in time—hopefully it’s one I never do.

Posted at 11:19 AM |