Bank Fees

I submitted the following as an Op-Ed to several newspapers, but none of them was interested enough in publishing it, so I post it here for your reading pleasure:

If you have not felt the sting of the recent economic woes, consider yourself lucky. Everyone I know has suffered to some degree, but many of us do not stop to consider how some of the greatest changes in the current economic system and banking industry can affect us all. While thousands have suffered the loss of homes and the destruction of their credit, millions more suffer quietly or unknowingly. These victims are not necessarily the poor, and they certainly are not the rich; oops, I mean “job creators.”

The largest group of sufferers in the current economic downturn, which still shows no clear signs of permanent positive recovery, is the middle class. These men and women, these families, the backbone of a country that once took pride in their success stories, are doomed to be lost in a financial world of ever-growing fees meant to combat the banking industries own shortfalls. We, the American middle class of consumers, those who spend more money on the economy than any other group, are left to pay for the mistakes of the financial industry. We, who mostly have been responsible with our money must give up whatever extra money we might have scraped together for a surplus, or heaven forbid some entertainment to escape the economy’s grim reality, are being robbed of the very monies we want to keep secure.

The irony is that those robbers are the same ones who have been robbing us for years. We are surrounded by banking corporations, even in small town America, too. In my current home town, Buena Vista, Virginia, which has a population around 6,200, there are five different banking institutions, two of which are branches of major banking corporations. One of those banks was, until very recently, where my family did all of our banking, Bank of America.

We absolutely loved our time with Bank of America, but in the wake of economic hardships caused by institutions just like Bank of America, they got greedy. It’s not enough that financial companies have destroyed the economy and received hefty bailout funds straight out of the taxpayers’ pockets. Companies like Bank of America have decided to double dip. For us, it started with the account maintenance fee. For many banks, it is easily avoidable with a direct deposit. And even if one is charged, most fees are only between $3.00 and $8.00 (Wells Fargo is an example of a nice middle of the road fee at $5.00). Bank of America makes it more complicated. Not only were they requiring us to have a direct deposit, but we had to meet another requirement, one of which was a minimum daily balance, which was set at a sum that many middle class, feeling the squeeze, are hard pressed to keep in their accounts.

I recently graduated from Florida State University, with a PhD in English Literature. I make my living as an assistant professor at Southern Virginia University, a small liberal arts college. I am not making “the big bucks.” My wife and I, both with graduate degrees and a family to support, find ourselves under the burden of heavy student loan debt, so we have each month budgeted out to the penny. Banking fees have no place. Thankfully, Bank of America decided against the debit card fees, but the account maintenance fees hurt us. Bank of America charges $12 per account (the basic one that we had). We had five accounts with them. We had a great system for paying bills, holding funds for bill pay and transfer, and different accounts we used for temporary and long term savings. That’s $60.00 a month in fees or $720.00 a year. We looked for ways to avoid fees, but we couldn’t avoid them all, even when we reduced the number of accounts and moved to strictly online banking. In the end, with banks scrambling to get their hands on even more revenue, our money felt much safer somewhere else, our local credit union.

If we keep choosing to give these banks our money, they will keep taking it, and one day we may find that while the banks are richer, we still have not gotten anywhere.