something is ROTTEN in the state of Denmark [it XTINCTS (something STINKS)]?!.....FREE checking soon to become eXTINCT?!

[RgrF]

Keep them if it's important to you. Most of us don't have those considerations.

[ztirffritz]

NPR did a story not long ago about how local banks a cleaning up by offering banking the way that customers want it. The big banks haven't even noticed yet , but they will once they notice a billion dollars or more missing from their coffers.

[Felix]

They'll just buy up the local banks.

[mattkime]

get yourself a job! i mean a real one!

so you have direct deposit....

between direct deposit and bill pay i'm safe on this one.

trisho. wrote:
Credit unions may be okay for most folks, but I tend to travel a lot and it's to not rack up ATM fees that way. I'm currently in Brussels and guess what? There's a major Citibank here (that's my home bank in the U.S.). I'm one of the people they're going to start charging $15 per month for EZ Checking. I may be moving to another bank when I get back to the US.

I say "may" because of the travel issue. As far as evil goes, Citibank was the least evil compared to BoA and Chase and I've had them for 10 years, since I moved to NYC. The other banks are well represented around the globe but they are way the hell more evil, what with BoA screwing over homeowners in their mortgages and Chase doing the same and being an old slavery-funded bank.

Citi may have me over a barrel in this case. One other option may be ING's online checking. I'd have to see how their features are. Does anybody use them for checking? I have their regular online savings accounts and briefly thought about their checking account when it debuted a couple of years ago.

[raz]

I was listening to NPR yesterday, and they had some flack for the banking lobby on claiming the new fees (he was defending BofA's $5/month Debit Card Fee) were forced on them by The Government. His argument was that those nasty Washington types limited the transaction fee to $0.24 to appease the retail lobby.

The interviewer was ill-prepared, though. The last I'd looked, the banks' cost per transaction was more like $0.07. But the real kicker are the clauses in Dodd/Frank that prevents banks from allowing the debit charge on a $2 latte to rack up $30 in fees - or to use the largest charge to do the overage, then assess fees on each of the smaller ones.

The bottom line is that the mega-banks (Citi, BofA, PNC, ...) no longer are content making money on the difference between what the pay in interest (almost zero) and the interest earned from loans. Those fees are their cash stream.

I switched to a small, local bank 10 years ago and never looked back.

[mattkime]

i use ing for checking. depositing $ is a bit weird, as i use paypal for that since i can simply take pics of the check with my iPhone. free withdrawals require looking up ATMs on their site as they're otherwise unmarked.

if you can put up with those two items then they're as good as anyone else.

[Robert M]

Gene,

I still have an older Bank of America checking account that doesn't incur monthly fees. It was grandfathered in and they haven't changed anything about it (yet). However, the regular checking account you described isn't a "direct deposit" free checking account. No such animal. It's a regular checking account whose monthly fee is waived if you have something directly deposited into it, i.e. paycheck, social security check, etc.

To everyone else,

Credit Unions may be good for some but they are absolutely not a viable choice for many people. As I said in the following thread:



One of the reasons people choose a regular bank be it a small regional bank like New York Community Bank or a national bank like Bank of America is convenience. Convenience for deposits. Convenience for customer service. Convenience because there are ATMS in a large number of locations. Convenience because its online banking system offers lots of features and is easy to navigate. You get the idea.

For me, I've yet to find a credit union that has a branch that is convenient enough to my office, my wife's office and our home justify becoming a member and opening an account with them. So, for my wife and I, credit unions aren't viable for a primary checking or savings type account due to inconvenience. I'd consider a credit union for a secondary account, though. That way, the inconvenience becomes a non-issue since I won't need to do anything with the account on a regular basis, just once in a long while.

Robert

[NewtonMP2100]

.....use USAA linked to a basic savings at Chase (minimum $300).....transfers from Chase to USAA are free and I have a local bank to deposit/do in-person banking.....but I put most of my money into the USAA account since they have free checking and free billpay.......

[OWC Jamie]

We closed the business bank account with BofA soon after they bought Merrill Lynch and mandated their reps not spend (much) service time on accounts under $250,00.00. They had a few reps quit over it, too.

They called twice wanting to know why we left.

[Lux Interior]

DaviDC. wrote:
Today I closed a 24 year old checking account & the f@#$%*s didn't even ask why.

Why would they care? How many banks are left now? Three?

They will gain customers from the other two banks who are irate at their new fees.