Dear Banks: give me access to my money. NOW.

Do you know what makes me angry? Holds on cheques I deposit into my bank account through the ATM machine. I can understand personal cheques – the bank wants to make sure the funds have cleared before I have access to the money, I get it. But government cheques? Come on.

I called PC Financial, and they said that for all cheques over $1k, there is a one-week hold on them, and I only have access to $1k of the money. So right now, I have about $3.5k sitting in limbo that I don’t have access to until Friday. Not that I need the money, I just want to get it the heck out of my chequing account and into my RRSPs where they belong.

With TD Canada Trust, if I deposited my cheque through a teller, I had immediate access to all of the money, regardless if it was a personal or a government cheque. But not with their ATM either. What’s the difference? It’s not like the teller can immediately tell whether the cheque is going to clear or not … so why don’t I get that same luxury when I use the ATM machine to deposit money? Maybe I could understand a 24-48 hrs. hold so they can sort through all the customer deposits through the ATM, but anything longer than that just doesn’t make sense.

My mom said that when she deposits cheques into her RBC account through the ATM, she gets immediate access to the entire amount. Maybe it has something to do with my banking history, or tenure, or something like that. But I had that TD chequing account for 23 years before I told them to shove it last summer (I didn’t actually tell them to ‘shove it’), so I’m not really sure.

Anger.