Banks Across the Country Rising Hidden Costs
Although Bank of America has been in the news a lot recently for hidden and/or outrageous usage fees, other banks around the country are just as or even more guilty of giving your retirement savings a run for its money with rising hidden fees!
Hidden fees are popping up in banks all over the country. Here are just a few of the fees some of the more prominent banks are issuing:
- Bank of America is issuing a $5 fee for a new debit card – $20 for rush delivery
- Although Bank of America abandoned their monthly $5 debit card use charge, they increased their cost of a basic MyAccess checking account from $8.95 to $12/month.
- Citigroup’s monthly checking account charge increased from $8/month to $10/month.
- U.S. Bankcorp is charging 50 cents per deposit when using your mobile device to deposit funds into an account
- In December TD Bank is implementing a $15 charge for each incoming domestic payment of cash being wired into their accounts
- Chase now charges a monthly fee of $12 for its standard checking account where many depositors used to pay no fee at all!
This quiet creep of new charges and higher fees for everything from cash withdrawals at ATMs to wire payments, paper statements and in some cases, even the overdraft charges that lawmakers hoped to ratchet down is causing a lot of outrage from bank customers. What is more, banks are raising minimum account balances and adding other new requirements so that it is harder for customers to qualify for fee waivers.
Why all the new charges?
Banks are not trying to be the evil corporations some try to make them out to be. Unforutnately, they’re just trying to make a profit in the same kind of range they did before laws were passed that forbade lucrative overdraft charges and lowering debit card swipe fees.
Those new laws prohibiting the outrageous fees some banks charged their customers actually makes $12 billion of banks annual income disappear! To make up for the loss banks would need to recoup, on average, between $15-20/month from each despositor, according to an analysis of the interest rate and regulatory changes on checking accounts by Oliver Wyman, a financial consulting firm.
Trying to Fix Fees…
Some policy makers are already fed up. This month, two Democratic senators, Richard J. Durbin of Illinois and Jack Reed of Rhode Island, urged the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to adopt a more consumer-friendly disclosure form, akin to the nutrition label on food packaging, for all the fees attached to a checking account.
“Simply put, consumers have had enough of banks that try to sneak fees past them that are hidden in fine print or imposed with no notice at all,” they wrote. Last year, a Pew Charitable Trusts study found that bank customers could potentially incur 49 different fees on a typical checking account.
