A small Hijack: BinaryDome, Don’t factor in overdrafty protection, it’s basically a racket. The effective interest rate on overdrafts can be over 1500%
See the latest issue of Nesweek…
Very true. My wife has that on her account, and the natural supposition is that the bank will cover your overdrafts and take it out the next time there’s money in the account. The phrase “overdraft protection”, to my mind, implies that your overdrafts will be paid and you will not be penalized for it; instead the bank will merely debit your account when the funds are available. But in fact this bank charges the same penalty on “allowed” overdrafts as on unallowed ones.
Javaman wrote:
Then stop doing injustices to yourself, jerk.
Wait a minute. Where do you think the money came from that paid off your debt? Hint: It didn’t come from YOUR account. What does the bank pay me for the privilege of “borrowing” my money? NOTHING.
The banks are screwing BOTH of us.
BTW, my bank has a (free) overdraft protection option where any amount overdrawn is charged to a credit card which you have to open with them. (I cut up the card when I received it so its only purpose is for overdraft protection.) If you use it, you’ll end up paying a cash advance fee and they only draw in quantities of $100, but I think it would have still been cheaper for you to go this route than pay all the service fees. You might want to make an inquiry at your bank.
True…the bank did cover my debt for less than 24 hours, and collect an extremely handsome fee for the courtesy. Libertarian, I didn’t mean to suggest that overdraft fees are unjustified in principle. I just think they’re way too high, and the way the banks seem to jiggle the transactions around to maximize the fee they stick you with is unfair. In any othe rline of business I think that would be illegal.
Maybe you can explain this to me…I’ve only had two bank accounts my adult life, one which the only fee was a flat 5 a month, and the other has no fees at all- one of those "simply free" accounts that doesn't charge you anything if you keep X amount of in the account. How are you subsidizing anything, though fees? If you had my sort of account it wouldn’t affect those who never over draw, since there’s no way to lower a fee that’s already zero. I think.
If you have another ISP, you can change your billing option on AOL to “bring your own provider” which would instead connect to the internet with the other ISP. The fee for it is $14.95 (used to be $10, but they hiked it about a year ago) instead of $25. It’s the option I use because my house has a cable modem connection as well.