mickeyd
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
Interesting story on bank fees got me to thinking that I have never paid a bank fee for any reason. Why are so many folks paying fees to banks? Perhaps they are the same folks that make no effort to pay of their CC balance each month. I bank with USAA and they grant me up to $15 each month for ATM fee reimbursement, but I seldom claim $5 of that in any month.
I know that I surely prefer "free checking" because it is indeed "free" for me.
NPR: Fee For All
So what's the rationale for the fee increase? Think of it like a parking ticket, Hall says. The fees are there to train customers to use their accounts responsibly -- if the fees too low, they provide no deterrent to practices that eat up a bank's resources.
If they get too high, the repercussions for customers can be devastating. The cases cited in Trejos and Starkey's article offer frightening worst-case scenarios, but Hall told me that in a 2008 study by the ABA, 65 percent of customers said that they paid $3 or less in monthly overdraft fees. He also told me that most customers, given the choice, prefer "free checking" with penalties to accounts that come with built-in maintenance fees.
I know that I surely prefer "free checking" because it is indeed "free" for me.
NPR: Fee For All