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About two years ago, we began hearing from New York Times readers whose banks were mysteriously closing their checking and savings accounts, and sometimes the accounts of their family members, too. It was as if the accounts had become tainted, and the banks refused to tell them why.
We began to investigate. We asked readers to share their experiences, and our inboxes were flooded with responses. Our reporting eventually turned into a series, Shuttered Accounts.
Among the 1,500 readers who wrote to us, several shared situations that raised new and confounding questions. One reader named Mike told us about a truly baffling situation: His bank seemed to have misplaced nearly $2 million of his money.
This wasn’t the first time we had seen notes from readers that had made us want to both scratch our heads and shout to the heavens. In fact, it reinforced an idea for a new feature that we’d been thinking about for a while, one in which we would try to help readers understand how something seemingly inexplicable happened to their money.
How Did This Happen?, a new monthly column, was born.
The three of us got together to talk about getting the series off the ground.
Ron Lieber: So this all started with a $1,869,000 check that was left on the sidewalk in Manhattan in front of a guy named Mike’s apartment building. Our own Mike (known internally as Coach Mike for his learned advice to fellow runners) could hardly believe it, so he reached out to the other Mike.
Mike Dang: Yes! His submission just seemed so unbelievable. I contacted him to see if I had his story straight. Did his bank really mail him a check for nearly $2 million via UPS and misdeliver it? Was the bank really that unhelpful when he reached out to get the situation fixed? The answer was yes in both cases. The bank had the wrong address on file, and the carrier simply left the check outside his building. When Mike went outside to look for the check, it wasn’t there.
Tara Siegel Bernard: No signature required either! It really blew all of our minds. I think it was the sheer absurdity of the situation that reminded us about an idea we had kicked around. There are so many instances like this — in our own lives, and in the lives of our readers — that leave us dumbfounded. We decided we should round them all up and get to the root of why these things happen.
I started a folder, and started to fill it with the stories that trickled in. Like the woman who wrote to me after her bank told her beneficiary that she was dead.
Lieber: Yes, the folder — by that time we had the vague notion that we could do some real, semiformal reader service here. Often, we’d reply to emails with advice on an ad hoc basis. But what we really wanted to know was how and why readers had ended up in these predicaments, through no fault of their own.
In other words, how on earth had this happened?!
Actually, we wanted to use some swear words, but that sort of thing isn’t allowed in a family newspaper.
Dang: We settled on calling this series How Did This Happen. We decided that we’d commit to investigating a reader’s predicament once a month. By the way, the reader who had that big check misdelivered eventually had his money returned to him around the time I contacted him. But it took about five months — five months too long to be without nearly $2 million. Since he had resolved it on his own, we decided not to write about it.
All of this happened in the spring of 2023, which means it took us about two years to get this series off the ground.
Siegel Bernard: But we’re finally doing it. The first column — about someone who lost his life savings when doing his first 401(k) rollover — ran last month.
I’ve already reviewed some situations that readers have sent in since then. How do stocks vanish from someone’s brokerage account? Why do cancer patients have to deal with mind-numbing insurance complexities on top of everything else? Why have our lives become so hard to administer? Besides the money, there’s the theft of our time. Hopefully we help readers get some of that back, and expose issues that need fixing.
Lieber: I’m so glad you’re doing the insurance thing, Tara. I have a real humdinger of an insurance thing to share personally soon. (Coach Mike, we can write about our own things once in a while, right?)
But mostly, we want to help New York Times readers. So many of you have been so generous over the years, feeding us story ideas and responding to queries from the Your Money newsletter. It’s made us better at what we do; as ever, none of us are as smart as all of us.
This is a chance to help you solve thorny problems — or at least get an explanation as to why and how something became a problem.
So please, send us the hardest questions about the most confounding things that involve money. You can use the form below or write to us directly at [email protected].
Ron Lieber has been the Your Money columnist since 2008 and has written five books, most recently “The Price You Pay for College.”
Tara Siegel Bernard writes about personal finance for The Times, from saving for college to paying for retirement and everything in between.
Mike Dang is the personal finance editor on the Business desk for The New York Times.
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