Although banks are financial institutions that can be used to your advantage, they can also be annoying to deal with. Banks may charge you a fee for taking out a personal loan or opening a simple savings account. Not to mention, the extra charges at the ATM machines. There are also a lot of fees that are not obvious. A bank is a business trying to make money before it is anything else. In the following article, we will review more about these fees and how they impact your bottom line, which is your net income.
If you use an ATM machine frequently, you are losing a lot of money over the course of time, which affects your bottom line. In fact, American ATM users pay over two billion dollars a year total to use the ATM. With numbers like that, it seems the banks could survive off nothing but ATM charges. ATM surcharges start at two dollars and can cost as much as five dollars. There are some banks that will not charge you for using one of their designated ATM machines. You will have to pay the fee if you do not use one of these designated ATM machines. If you have this sort of deal with your bank, make sure that they are not charging you the fee as they promised. There have been reports of banks charging a service fee on top of the service fee at the ATM after they promised no fees at particular ATM machines. Avoiding ATM machines is a good idea if you want to keep your net income up, even if you are avoiding some of the fees at the ATM. There are also fees on plans most of the time. A bank may advertise a plan as being free, but they will find other ways to charge you extra money. Some aspects may be free about a plan, but you can be sure if your checking is free, they are charging you extra somewhere else to make up for that. Depending on what type of account you open, you may be paying fees on various things.
Overdraft charges are also an annoyance that will impact your bottom line. If these charges are not taken care of, they may lead to the bank closing your account and sending your negative balance over to a collection agency. If a collection agency receives your negative account balance, you can be sure that it will be effecting your credit score. This can also be a bad situation if you have multiple bank accounts open between different banks. If one bank closes your accounts down, it may trigger the other banks to do the same thing. Basically, any extra fees and charges will impact your bottom line. They may also end up impacting your credit score, which will be very inconvenient in many situations. When your credit score is bad, you will have trouble getting a loan or financial help with anything. If you are losing any money, you are losing net worth.
