A lot of times, we pay for things from which we get little to no value. The biggest culprit are pesky fees and charges related to borrowing money or late with payment.
Big banks are faceless, and they adhere to making profits in a black and white fashion. Let's outline a couple things they do, and what I do to avoid those pesky fees.
- Overdraft fees are basically the bank doing you a favor by allowing you to spend more money than you actually have available. That's the point of a credit card, right? I stopped writing checks and using debits on everyday purchases. I exclusively use cash back credit cards such as Discover, Bank of America, and Chase Freedom, thus building a cushion in my checking account that won't overdraft. If you pay your credit cards in full each money, you won't ever have to pay finance charges, and can make money on your purchases and on the money earning interest in your bank account! Bouncing checks seems to be a thing of the past, huh? I wouldn't know, but I know that I have only had an overdraft charge when a bank account we closed inexplicably reopened to pay an unintended auto-draft. I still get annoyed if I dwell on it too long.
- Checking fees are a joke since no one really uses checks anymore, but people still pay them. A lot of banks charge maintenance fees for you to have the privilege to write checks that they will pay using your money. We have a credit union account that doesn't have fees on checking, and as long as we have our statements online and make 12 debits a month, we get paid interest on our holding in checking. Used to yield 4.5%, but George W. Bush was president then and interest rates have significantly dropped in the past four years.
For further advice, I suggest that you Google "avoid unnecessary fees," and you will get more examples of fees that you can avoid paying. A penny saved on frivolous fees is a penny that can be spent on
me.
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