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I was thinking about this today at work (I work at a credit union) while I was looking over our fee schedule. Does anyone else find it a bit asinine that (some) banks require people to pay to access their own money? I'm talking about paying to use an ATM, transfer money between accounts, wire money between financial institutions, use a debit card to pay for transactions, etc.
Of course, if you have common sense, you can get around paying those fees by using branch specific ATMs and using a debit card as a credit card, or just using cash for everything...but it still seems so absurd for a company to have the balls to tell someone "Yeahhh if you want access to the money that you earned, we're gonna need our share too." Screw that.
How do you feel about this issue? What are other items you can think of that you can't believe people are charged for? I think that I read a while back that an airline was going to start charging people to use the bathroom or something? If that's true, I would fall on the floor from laughing so hard.
I spent 13 years in banking at the low end (teller) and while I thought for the most part the fee schedule was a huge moneymaking ripoff, in some ways I did understand it.
First off -- back when I was in banking, free checking was NOT the norm. In fact, let me go farther back -- when I got my first account, ATMs were almost unheard of, and few places had them. You were expected to keep a certain amount in your checking account to not have a service fee.
If you didn't have that kind of money to let sit in an account, you picked an account that charged a small monthly fee.
And a savings account was for SAVING.
When I started working for a small bank, that was the dawn of free checking -- but you had to have direct deposit or multiple accounts or something that made the branch manager want to waive the fees. And that was the thing -- all these account had fees associated with them, but they were waived. In my mind that's a different beast than free checking.
But I got to see that people were totally irresponsible. I had many people that would write a check, and get home and call us to transfer that amount into their checking from their savings to cover it, because they only kept a few pennies in the account. We didn't have time for all that AND wait on the lines, so we started charging telephone transfer fees.
We had people that couldn't manage a simple savings account. They'd come in to cash their check, put a hundred in and in the next few weeks come in every day to take out five dollars, till they were down to five or ten bucks again and bring in their next check. That's when the over five withdrawals a month fee kicked in.
I had a woman scream bloody murder at me over ATM fees, because instead of hitting that she wanted 200 bucks out of the ATM, she kept hitting 20 over and over and over -- each time with a 2 dollar fee. That she had to push the button to accept EACH TIME.
She did it at the Wells Fargo ATM.
One half of a block away from our ATM. Because why should SHE walk an extra 40 steps.
So while I think in some ways fees are like a stupid tax, in reality -- and you work for one, even though it's a credit union and as such is a non-profit -- these fees are what's paying your salary. Banks and Credit Unions aren't free. They have to make money. They make it to lend it, to give it back to their clients in the horrible interest rates they are paying, and they make it to pay their employees and their rents -- because you don't work for nothing and the landlord wants his money, too.
I think that is something we have forgotten in this country of ours. We have such a sense of entitlement that our food should be cheap, our music should be free so we steal it and that we should only make the minimum payments on our stuff. What we forget is that ALL this stuff we think should be free have entities behind themthat hire people to work there, and all those people need to eat, shelter and clothe themselves and their families.
I don't pay any fees for anything, but if you choose to do business with someone, you should scope out what their fees and rules are. If they are unacceptable to you, go do business somewhere else.
Thru my credit union in Denver and myself in Florida 20 years,free ATM thruout USA and at some can deposit.Also all accounts earn interest.Never a problem in 10 years,been a member for over 30,part of co-op network.Do all my business on line,nothing local.
but it still seems so absurd for a company to have the balls to tell someone "Yeahhh if you want access to the money that you earned, we're gonna need our share too."
Well they are providing you a service right? Instead of hiding wads of cash under your mattress you give it to them and they keep it safe and let you have access to it from all sorts of different places, with them handling lots of the accounting and reporting chores.
I don't pay any fees either, but I don't use ATMs at all, so there might be fees for that. However, they aren't fees to access your money, they are convenience fees to access your money from atypical places.
I use my debit card all the time and have never been charged any fees for that.
I think the more important question is why aren't you paying fees? Are you working around the bank's fee schedules? Do you keep enough money that fees are refunded?
The reason I say this is because I'm reading that more and more banks are going back to charging for services. The absolutely free checking with no strings attached is going the way of the do-do bird.
Back when I was at a small business oriented bank, we had tons of business checking accounts. Business checking is an odd duck of an account. A business checking account has to earn the bank profit to offset its fees in order to be free. And business checking accounts got charged for EVERYTHING. Every check processed had a fee, every check deposited had a fee, when we counted the cash we had to tell the proof how many bills we counted -- fee. All the change handed out -- fee. A copy fee, a this fee, a that fee -- the fee schedule was a page and half long.
The overwhelming cast majority of accounts we had made the bank a profit and as such were not charged. But the bank accounted for the fee income, and some of these accounts were tallying up 700 bucks a month in fees -- they were just more than 700 bucks a month more profitable.
Right now, we have accounts that are staked on us doing all our business with our bank. We have a business account, a personal account, a HELOC and a home loan which they sold off, but we get credit for doing through them. If I decide to close one of my accounts, all the others won't be free to me.
My ATM access is technically free, because the fees charged are refunded at the beginning of the next checking cycle.
I think the more important question is why aren't you paying fees? Are you working around the bank's fee schedules? Do you keep enough money that fees are refunded?
::shrug::
Why? Because I don't do anything that results in fees.
I have free, no minimum balance checking (checks free too!). I don't use an ATM or debit card, because I see no reason TO use those.
I charge everything I can and pay on the CC weekly. Never carry a balance.
I have never bounced a check/overdrawn an account.
When you hire the bank to hold your money for you, they charge you a fee for this service. Put it under your mattress, which will not charge you a fee.
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