Your bank account, oddly enough, may actually be costing you money over time. This is particularly true if you use a bank account that requires the payment for checks, for having under a certain amount of money, or for multiple other things.
Many of the larger banks today, sadly enough, simply do not respect their customers and understand that customer is what sustains them. They will charge an exorbitant fee for ordering new checks for monies which are taken out at the ATM machines and limit the amount that you can remove in the course of a day.
If your bank is like this one, then maybe its time to change your bank account to one of the smaller banks who tend more toward customer service. These might include smaller local banks or state banks, or the less well known and respected banks as opposed to the banks that operate nationally or internationally.
While the amount of money that they have on hand may be smaller and it might be a bit more difficult to secure a loan, it will also be easier to get to your funds and to accomplish certain other tasks.
If your bank is costing you a fortune, then considering a move might be in order. Banks such as Wamu and others permit you to begin your account online, allow you to deposit online as well as to offer you things such as free checks, free ATM withdrawals from many areas, and do bring you some added benefits while still offering the same FDIC protection for your funds that you expect from some of the more international banking moguls.
Get some respect from your bank account. Use one that offers you free checking, and gives you interest if your account goes over a certain balance and remains there, rather than one that penalizes you for not having enough money in your account.
There are also some banks which will charge you a fee each month that you do not put money into savings. This was a problem that we ran into with a child’s saving account. Each month that the child could not afford to deposit, the bank removed five dollars. Not exactly a great way to encourage the kids to save.
We transferred to a bank that didn’t use this kind of penalty so that money was not removed to punish them for not being able to deposit their funds for a month. Doing so saved about five dollars per month for each month we were not able to put in a deposit.