OK, generally, eveyone needs a bank, unless you want to make the unwise decision of walking around with scads of money in your pocket. While it's good to have some cash on hand, mainly, you need a bank, and the banks know this, and for that reason if you deal with a bank you will get among the most severe beat-downs in all of consumer-dom! Of course, if you're depositing several hundreds of thousands of dollars every month or so, they'll treat you like real a family member, but since most of us don't do that, we have permitted ourselves to be placed at the mercy of merciless money mongers, who not only want to use your money (they loan it out and it brings them almost sinful profits), but they want to OWN as much of your money as they can, and boy have they come up with some sick ways of doing it.

Banks will sing the praises of 24-hour banking (by ATM of course) and then charge you 2-3 dollars if you need to go inside and maybe interrupt Suzi's nail filing. Good old Brian will be happy to order you some checks: for $25 and of course they have no duplicates and include a cheesy plastic checkbook holder, but never fear, if you need copies of your checks, they're just $15 a month. A few years ago, I got a free month of AOL, in the form of a check,which I deposited in my bank. Well, the check bounced (?!), and the bank charged ME $6 for that; as if it was my mistake that AOL's check bounced. The point is, they nickle, dime and dollar you to death with various fees and charges. Basically, all they want you to do is give them your money so they can loan it out at exorbitant rates of interest, then they have the audacity to charge YOU for letting them use your money! Are we falling for this? (yep). Are we nuts? (obviously).

Consider this, I have a checking account with the ABC Bank (ficticious, but this story is true). One day, I'm in the XYZ Bank (also ficticious) because I decided to make a payment on my car loan in person. While there, I see a sign that says if I open a checking account with XYZ, they will give me a $50 gas card, and also the monthly fee would be $7 a month. Well, I was paying $15 a month to ABC, so I went to ABC and told Marilou (or whomever) that I wanted to cancel and switch to another bank. I tried to be nice and not tell her I was switching because of the cost (really it wasn't any of her business), but she insisted that her computer screen was forcing her to selct from a list of cancellation reasons, so I finally told her. Know what she said? She said, "Oh, we can waive that monthly fee!"...all happily like that was supposed to mean something great to me. I said, "Wait a minute. You mean to tell me that I have been paying $15 a month for all this time that I didn't have to pay? And now, knowing that, I'm supposed to want to keep doing business here?" She looked a litle at a loss for words over that. Of course, I cancelled.

Have you ever overdrawn your checking account? Lately, I mean? Have you noticed that checks rarely actually bounce anymore, like they used to? What happens now is that the bank will go ahead and honor it and just take 30 or 35 dollars from you. It amounts to a short term loan with extremely high interest. Now, you might say (and I will too), that it's up to you to keep track of how much money you have, but don't we all lose track a little at times? Well, maybe not all, but I'm sure most of us do. There are a couple things banks do to try to help you overdraw, especially if yours happens to be one of those paycheck-to-paycheck families. First, if you aren't constantly diligent, and you happen to forget to enter a transaction, then how do you know what your balance is? If you go to the bank's web site, you will see two balances: a Ledger Balance and an Available Balance. and these numbers are very likely to be different. Don't think you can trust either, because neither takes into account pending transactions that haven't cleared yet. Also, if you go to their ATM and do a balance check, you will get yet a different "Available" figure. What's wrong here? Can't the BANK count? If I have $300 in my checking account, and I use my debit card to get, say $30 worth of gas, doesn't something happen to verify that I have an account, and that there are funds available? Of course. So why, after it's done doesn't my available balance instantly show $270? I know enough about computer technology to know that that update can happen immediately. Yet, it might be 2 or 3 days before my balance is affected by that transaction. On the other hand, if the next day I spend $50 on groceries, that one will show against my balance the same day...maybe. The point is, there is no way to tell, sometimes a transaction is reflected right away, sometimes it's a day or two, and I have seen it be as much as 5-6 days! Is the bank deliberately trying to confuse me so that it increases the chance that I'll overdraw? I can't prove it, but in my opinion, yes. In fact, I once made a purchase that totaled $142, and the cashier charged the entire amount against my debit card, before I got the chance to tell her I was going to pay $100 of that in cash. At that time I had transactions that were 5 days old that hadn't cleared my bank yet. The very next day, everything I had done that week was blasted through, including a $142 transaction and a $42 (apparently they hadn't realized that the $142 was going to be voided). This overdrew my account, and I didn't even have time to make a transfer to cover it. That next day, my checking account showed a negative balance. Of course , it was allright because the $142 transaction was never fulfilled. Still, I think they saw an overdraft in the making and decided to quickly clear everything to "help things along". It's a beat-down, I tell you!

I once asked the bank why they did this and could not get an answer...at all. The only thing they kept saying was that I needed to make sure I kept track of things myself (which of course is true). When I asked about the exorbitant overdraft fee, they said, "Well, accounts that are in overdraft status require special handling, and that's why we charge the fee." What special handling are they talking about? If someone presents a check, and the teller punches up the account number and there isn't enough money to cover it, why can't she just hand the check back to the payee and say, sorry, no funds? What special handling takes place that warrants them taking over $30? Same thing if I swipe my debit card; if I have insuffucient funds, the little readout needs to simply say "Declined" and that's it. But the bank wants your money, and they'll beat you down to get it!

What to do? Don't be fooled by the notion of bank competition; they do get together and agree on things like this. A big bank like BankOne (now Chase), isn't going to run another big bank like National City out of business. Yes, they compete, but they also come together and discuss adopting similar policies like these, so that both banks make more money in spite of "churn". They aren't stupid. But we are, at least to some degree, because we stand for this mess and keep putting our money in places where they can pretty much take of it if they want to, by various fees and charges that are meaningless, unless they mean to put more of YOUR money into THEIR coffers. And that's all they mean, believe me.