17 December 2011
Thanks For All The Cash, Suckers!
So Citibank (recipient of huge piles of save-us cash from the taxpaying public) recently changed terms on some of their entry-level checking accounts. Flat fee if you don't maintain a certain deposit level across any and all "linked" products. Reasonable in general? Sure. But that particulars? Fee is $15 a month (seems high!) unless you maintain net deposit balances of... $6000. Wow! I may be out of touch, but that seems like an awful lot of money to have on hand to park into accounts effectively bearing no interest whatsoever. That's some brass, Citibank -- congrats!
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Shitty Bank, SkankofAmerica, GoChaseYourself, have all adopted very punitive, very "15 focused" basic checking / fund-availability policies. When 1/2 of America is at or under the poverty line, large corporate banks would be stupid to cater to these large loss leaders, and not pass up a chance to milk them for more cash. It's not a "conspiracy". Heck any fool - even from the dumbest of fraternities - with just an MBA can see that the profits are not with the increasingly poor and disenfranchised teaming masses. It's with the concentrated upper 1%, to whom $6000 is pocket change.
DDF & I are several percentage points away from the 1%, and when we looked at moving our funds during "Bank Transfer Weekend" out of WFargo (the dominant banking force in the SW US) even small Arizona credit unions (which by their very non-profit nature are much less insidious) required minimum daily balances of $5000 or $10,000 to get all the "free checking", "unlimited ATM use", "no monthly fee" waivers.
The "secret niche" we have with WF is the "direct deposit" avenue, wherein WF drops all of its fees for online banking, checking, atms, fund transfers, etc. I am not sure how long WF will keep us on the "good boys and girls" Christmas list though.
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