331–340 of 480 posts
I don't quite see how an overdraft fee (one of the examples given) is a junk fee - it costs the bank real money to cover the loan they are effectively giving you when you are in overdraft.
How about just rejecting the withdrawal instead of overdrafting?
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Adding further: many banks make it difficult or impossible to opt out of overdraft programs. I had to have a huge argument with my local rep. She kept insisting "what if there isn't enough money to cover the transaction?" and did not seem to understand that it was perfectly acceptable to me for such a transaction to fail, rather than succeed and incur a substantial fee.
To anyone reading this, you often need to write a letter to the bank. I was quite irritated at the time and made the bank manager give me a piece of paper which he then accepted as a "letter". Don't get me started on the level of irritated you need to get a bank manager to void protocol, lol.
Smaller online banks & credit unions typically don’t have any fees now.
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Cool story. How does that help the hundreds of thousands of very poor people who are trying very hard to pinch pennies in dire straights?
Is there something preventing them from visiting the bank manager? Or are you implying that being poor means the bank should cover the overdraft?
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The "12.5% service charge" you see all over London would beg to differ.
Haven't been there in a while, but I was able to collect VAT refunds a LHR. Is that on top of VAT?
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In the recent past, US banks were found to have specifically designed software to calculate how to best re-order customer transactions to maximise overdraft fees. Banks also generally make it hard/impossible to opt out of overdraft, something that would probably be preferable to many customers. Overdraft fees are a huge source of income these days.
Yeah it's annoying, but that still doesn't make it a hidden fee. They tell you upfront, and your "opt out" is to not overdraft your account.
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When they'd do the reordering to me, I'd go visit the bank manager and point out how many years I'd been a loyal customer. Then she'd fix it.
That's great, and sad that such a thing would be necessary.
It works a lot better than complaining on the internet!
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Is there something preventing them from visiting the bank manager? Or are you implying that being poor means the bank should cover the overdraft?
being poor means the bank manager won't speak with you, and also the bank doesn't much care to have you as a customer
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Depends on your location. If you are somewhere with a 5% sales tax for example, it would be $0.25. If you don't want to have to know the sales tax for your location, I believe the highest sales tax in the US is under 11% so just give the kid $5.55.
What's the tax on the individual items in question, also, because it's all variable based on what you're buying, what city you're in etc. Pretty much everywhere else I've travelled in the world, the price on the shelf is the price you pay, even when tax changes based on what something is classified as (to whit that fun legal case of "is a jaffa cake a cake or a biscuit"). For some absolutely bizarre self-hating reaso…
You're overlooking the context. Someone said it was easy to let young children go shopping in places where taxes are included in the sticker price because you can give the kid $5 and the kid knows they can buy any item with a sticker price that does not exceed that or a combination of cheaper items whose sticker prices do not sum to more than 5$.
The implication was that this is harder for young children in the US, presumably because young children won't be able to do the complicated mathematical finagling that the rest of the world apparently thinks Americans do every time they go to the store.
My point is that in the US you just give the child $5 plus enough to cover tax, and then the child can use exactly the same approach those kids elsewhere use: if sum of sticker prices <= $5 they have enough money.
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Is there something preventing them from visiting the bank manager? Or are you implying that being poor means the bank should cover the overdraft?
You literally mentioned appealing to your long-term relationship with the bank. You know full well that your situation doesn't generalize.
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Is there something preventing them from visiting the bank manager? Or are you implying that being poor means the bank should cover the overdraft?
I think they’re implying that the banks shouldn’t reorder the charges and should pick up the phone when we call them to opt out of overdraft altogether.