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Speaking of fees, one credit union is charging a $2 fee for not having your deposit slip ready when you reach the drive up window. And here’s an article about bank fees in general.
All these fees banks and credit card companies tack on remind me of that great scene in the Hudsucker Proxy.
“You punch in at 8:30 every morning, except you punch in at 7:30 following a business holiday, unless it’s a Monday, then you punch in at 8 o’clock. Punch in late and they dock you. Incoming articles get a voucher, outgoing articles provide a voucher. Move any article without a voucher and they dock you. Letter size a green voucher, oversize a yellow voucher, parcel size a maroon voucher. Wrong color voucher and they dock you! 6787049A/6. That is your employee number. It will not be repeated! Without your employee number you cannot get your paycheck. Inter-office mail is code 37, intra-office mail 37-3, outside mail is 3-37. Code it wrong and they dock you! This has been your orientation. Is there anything you do not understand, is there anything you understand only partially? If you have not been fully oriented, you must file a complaint with personnel. File a faulty complaint and they dock you!”
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New fees are imposed all the time. It pays to review those statements to see what they are.
Early payment and partial payment penalties would be outlawed if our legislatures were working for us and not for the Banks.
I calculated that depending on the definition used about 30-40 % of all money transactions entered into contain some measure of fraud. Its amazing what people will do for money.
I’m just hoping there’s no fee for posting this. Seriously though, the best are the ATM fees. Initially, banks pushed the ATMs because it meant that they could hire fewer tellers. Once people got used to (abused to?) the ATMs, they started charging an ATM fee. On a scale from 1 to you gotta be fucking kidding me this one goes to 11.
Any bets on how long it takes for the toll discounts for using EZ-Pass to become EZ-Pass fees?
Find a good credit union. They aren’t like the banks; they are non-profits and owned by the members. Mine, with a reasonable deposit, gives free checking, free checks, free bill pay, free ATM use, free ATM use at some of the ATM chains, and a reasonable price for a safe deposit box. It also seems like they valuable their employees more than any bank, if that matters to you.
The big banks are like the big direct computer companies and the big discount stores of the financial world – out to make money by screwing customers and employees as much as possible and quite happy to dispose of them if they aren’t profitable enough. I really dislike banks.
The new America doesn’t make any useful products, we just buy them from the far east. So while our money last, that is until we send the last one to Sony, we must find new ways to circulate the remaining dollars.
Fees, such as licenses, insurance for things we never needed insurance for before, these are the two biggies. They provide no useful product to be circulated but consume nearly all of our resources.
I’m teaching my grandkids to speak Spanish so they will have a viable occupation when they grow up.
To follow up on #3, the vast majority of Credit Unions do not have fees. Further, such fees in the financial industry serve as incentive to do certain things. Don’t like ATM fees? They’re there because they want you to use debit and credit cards.
#5 – I’ll set aside all the conspiracy BS about the dangers of a cashless society… Using debit cards is only viable if you track every transaction when it happens (or if you have so much money that it doesn’t matter).
I watch people use debit cards like credit cards and they tell me that every few days they go online and check their balance…
Well… THAT’s accurate! I use cash.
But who pays ATM fees? People who use ATMs other than their own bank’s ATM. Use your Bank’s ATM. That isn’t so hard to understand.
“The new America doesn’t make any useful products, we just buy them from the far east. ”
I take exception to that! The only reason we’ve moved out of the manufacturing business is because the future of labor is in high tech areas. Why would we want to be a society of factory laborors when we could be building a nation of scientists and engineers? I say, let those jobs go overseas so we can focus our attention on the future.
For example, there is currently a great demand in the world for software engineers.
Oh, wait a minute… never mind.
I see you used the French spelling.
When I first came to the States I was surprised (to say the least) to be charged $30 the first time a check I deposited (deposited, mind you, not wrote) bounced. I was actually paying for someone else’s delinquency. “Free Checking” my arse.
I closed out the account and have never accepted checks since. And when I started shopping around for my mortgage you can bet that that bank wasn’t on the list.