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Thread: How to Avoid Paying Bank Fees

  1. #1
    Join Date
    Apr 2005
    Posts
    46,704

    Default How to Avoid Paying Bank Fees



    1.The easiest way to avoid bank fees is the most obvious: keep careful track of every penny coming in and going out of your account and do not spend against the future! You may have a direct deposit going in every other Friday, so you write a check on Tuesday, depending upon the "float time" it takes for the check to hit the Federal Reserve before coming back to your bank for actual payment. You are thinking your direct deposit will be in by then, right? Hopefully you know by now that checks are being processed by most places electronically and can be submitted for payment the same day you write them.

    2.Keep track of your deposits and withdrawals daily. Banks are not non-profit organizations: they depend upon core deposits to meet their own loan obligations, and they need fee income to cover the basic expenses of any business. If a customer is less than diligent about keeping track of his account balance and consistently overdraws his account but continues to make deposits that bring the account into the positive, the bank will happily accommodate the customer by paying the checks but charging the overdraft fees. There is no deception involved here at all.

    3.Read the fine print and ask questions. When an account is opened at my financial institution, every bit of this information is openly disclosed to the customer. Free overdraft protection is offered, which is like a consumer loan with a hefty rate that is also disclosed. A customer may or may not qualify for it, but in the event that he doesn't, he has the option of using a savings account for overdraft transfers, at the cost of $5.00 a transfer, rather than a $29.00 overdraft fee.

    4.Be frugral and pay attention to your account activity. Do not write checks for funds not immediately available to cover these withdrawals. Otherwise be of the understanding that banks do have the right to charge overdraft fees according to their policies and will continue to do so if you are not scrupulous in watching your fund balances. Avoid these unnecessary overdraft fees by not spending money that is not yet available to you.

    5.Ask questions. You always have every right to question any charges to your account and a bank will happily reverse any error they might have made. Simply ask to speak with an account representative to go over your questions, rather than attempt to resolve a dispute with a teller who may not be trained to handle extensive account inquiries.

    You may also question any bank's check holding policies, which are put in place to protect the customer as well as the bank. A majority of banks today are unwilling to verify the authenticity of a check drawn off their institution for the simple fact that it potentially violates what is known as the Privacy Act. The Privacy Act was put into place to ensure that banks and their staffs would be held to the highest possible standard in protecting sensitive customer information, such as social security and driver's license numbers. Some banks feel that confirming a check drawn off them is valid could potentially violate the Privacy Act. Therefore, banks now have hold policies for local checks up to three business days to ensure that the check will be paid by the issuing institution.

    Keywords: Tax and finanace, bank, saving, money,financial institution,Avoid Paying Bank Fees

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Dec 2011
    Posts
    1

    Default What I Discovered To Avoid Paying Bank Fees

    I totally agree with this post!! I have found that the info helped me get better with my finances but didn't completely solve my problem. I discovered a couple of free tracking sheets that I print out that help me really apply this advice more easily. I use them almost every other day. Holy Smoke!! Life gets so hectic sometimes that I can't keep track of all the payments going out sometimes - not in my head anyway. And I have bank accounts and credit cards that payments come out of. It's hard to keep in my mind where the money is supposed to be and at what time...and I'm working with a small budget and credit card balances that I'm still working to pay down so it makes things stressfull. So I find these tracking sheets really help me to manage things a lot better. There are tutorials with the tracking sheets too. If you go to www.trueendlesswealth.com/simple-financial-management-resources.html the two forms I'm talking about are called Schedule of Payments and Credit Card Tracker. These have been lifesavers for me and I hope they will be for anyone else who reads this. I'm a lot less stressed now than I used to be!

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