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The most profitable source of income for banks? Overdraft fees

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Re: The most profitable source of income for banks? Overdraft fees

#131

Post by ams6110 »

staunch wrote: post #6

The pain overdraft fees cause poor people is truly hard to comprehend unless you've been there. It's incredibly evil. You've got $16 left for food and then then the Flickr account you forgot to cancel gets charged to your account, putting your balance at -$9. Now you have to pay $35/day until you get enough money to cover the overdraft fees. You end up paying $100+ for a $9 forced loan. The bank could have just decli…

Never never never bank with the big national banks like Chase, BoA, etc. Find a local bank or credit union, they are generally much more reasonable with their fees and penalties and often have free overdraft privileges (with some caveats -- understand those!).

Never set up automatic payments directly from your bank account. Pay your bills manually, once or twice a month whatever fits best with your cash flow.

Re: The most profitable source of income for banks? Overdraft fees

#132

Post by a3n »

sremani wrote: post #103
silveira wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Civil forfeiture laws in the US. I don't feel safe carrying a reasonable amount of cash. Here the police can just rob me, and now I'm guilty until proven innocent. In DC it costs up to $2500 for the right to challenge a police seizure in court, it's complex, expensive and it can take years.

Technically, the cash is guilty not you.

I guess if cash is speech then cash can be a person too.

Can I send my cash to jury duty? :)

Re: The most profitable source of income for banks? Overdraft fees

#133

Post by ceejayoz »

MereInterest wrote: post #26
Cacti wrote: post #22

It's important to keep in mind that "overdraft fees" is a complete horseshit of a term. The banks could easily just deny the transaction... there's nothing in the universe that says you have allow your customers account to overdraft. As the link says, these really are not fees, but short-term high-interest loans, extended by the bank to the customer, with an intent little different from other high-interest short-term…

In addition, the fact that they label it as "overdraft protection" is thoroughly ridiculous. Overdraft protection should protect me from overdrafts by denying a transaction. Instead, the worst effect of the overdraft, being charged an additional fee, is applied.

Bingo. It makes the overdraft worse.

Re: The most profitable source of income for banks? Overdraft fees

#134

Post by danharaj »

fredkbloggs wrote: post #127
danharaj wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's probably because people usually grow out of the stage of political awareness where one imagines human beings to be atoms that aren't connected to one another. If you think that 'personal responsibility' or whatever allows you to judge someone as stupid, inferior, or deserving of misery, then you will have a bias that makes you see people as individuals cut off from all social and economic context because it give…

I don't feel that I'm a weaker counterparty. If I find myself feeling that way in a relationship, I am going to renegotiate its terms or end it. The problem that you Progressivists have is that you cannot distinguish apparent power from real power. A bank may be evil, but its power over you is illusory. You are still free to terminate your relationship with it at any time. Real power comes only from the ability to us…

I'm not a 'progressivist'.

Re: The most profitable source of income for banks? Overdraft fees

#135

Post by ams6110 »

silveira wrote: post #77
mikekchar wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a couple of times in my life when I was quite poor (for someone living in a G8 country...) The biggest thing I learned was to use cash. Cash is awesome because you can see how much you have and you can't spend more than you have. Even now that I am relatively well off, I have my habitual routine of getting cash at the beginning of the week and spending only that for the week. In fact, I make sure that there…

Civil forfeiture laws in the US. I don't feel safe carrying a reasonable amount of cash. Here the police can just rob me, and now I'm guilty until proven innocent. In DC it costs up to $2500 for the right to challenge a police seizure in court, it's complex, expensive and it can take years.

It rarely happens. Like cops shooting unarmed people in the back, it isn't something that you really need to worry about.

Re: The most profitable source of income for banks? Overdraft fees

#137

Post by fredkbloggs »

kefka wrote: post #123
fredkbloggs wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't wait until the next day to make the purchase? Couldn't use cash or a credit card instead? You're an adult. You're obviously literate or you couldn't be posting here. Unless these fees were not disclosed to you (a MAJOR breach of the law if true), you had every opportunity to know that this would occur and to prevent it. Try taking responsibility for your own actions.

Ah, so if every bank gives a 1000 page boilerplate "contract", and they all entail usurious fees, it's just the person's problem because they should have known? Well, fuck that logic. All the banks are acting in a cartel with these. And banking is effectively required. Many workplaces require direct deposit, which guess what..... require a bank account. Banking should be boring, simple, and hassle free. Contracts sho…

> Ah, so if every bank gives a 1000 page boilerplate "contract", and they all entail usurious fees, it's just the person's problem because they should have known?

Yes. If someone hands me a 1000-page contract and asks me to sign it, I'm walking out the door. As any sane person would.

> All the banks are acting in a cartel with these.

Well, (a) numerous posters (who otherwise agree with you) seem to disagree on this point and have offered both specific and general recommendations for banks that perhaps are not. And (b), if that's true, you should open your own bank. If you can't, then you should go look into why you can't, because the barriers to entry in this space are 100% artificial; that is, they are creations of the government. Not the market.

> Banking should be boring, simple, and hassle free. Contracts should be simple and readable, and not filled with dense legalese and caveats that say "tl;dr: we can change anything we like whenever we like. oh and we post it underneath a rock".

I agree 100%. I look forward to opening an account at your bank.

Re: The most profitable source of income for banks? Overdraft fees

#138

Post by pyre »

mikekchar wrote: post #84
pyre wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The last time I tried to rent a room at a hotel in Canada, they would not accept cash -- credit card only. This has more to do with the hotel's liability. If you steal from the hotel or damage the room, they will apply those extra charges to your credit card. Even if your credit can't cover the costs, your verified credit card information tells them that you didn't provide a false name, and they have someone to cha…

I live in Japan now. In Japan they take a photocopy of some ID containing your address for that purpose. My understanding is that the reason hotels want a credit card is that they pre-charge it with a deposit and then refund it when they check the room. You never see the pre-charge transactions so you don't know about it. I have successfully negotiated with some hotels to take cash by offering them a cash deposit. So…

> so the next time I travel in the west (soon) is going to be an adventure...

Well, there are pre-paid credit cards. You could always try those, but IIRC some hotels refuse to take them.

It's also easier for the hotel to just charge extra to the credit card than to track down the person and possibly send the debt to collections. I've personally witnessed (while working for a hotel/casino) people get charged for things that they took from the room (robes, towels, etc) on the day that they checked out. At that point, the hotel already has the money, and dealing with the charges is the customer's problem. If they just took down information, then they have to spend time chasing down the customer to get them to pay the extra bill. From what I know of Japanese culture, delinquent customers are probably not as much of a problem as they are in (e.g.) the US.

While I can understand how much harder it is for hotel patrons without credit cards, hopefully you can also see it from the hotel's perspective when dealing with "bad faith" customers.

Re: The most profitable source of income for banks? Overdraft fees

#139

Post by joe5150 »

staunch wrote: post #6

The pain overdraft fees cause poor people is truly hard to comprehend unless you've been there. It's incredibly evil. You've got $16 left for food and then then the Flickr account you forgot to cancel gets charged to your account, putting your balance at -$9. Now you have to pay $35/day until you get enough money to cover the overdraft fees. You end up paying $100+ for a $9 forced loan. The bank could have just decli…

There are also good banks that, unlike USAA, most people can actually join with minimum hassle. CapOne360 and Ally have both done me very well, no connections needed.
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