I'm back to cash, got out of the stock market because I don't have enough to gamble with, and joined a credit union where I am now earning interest on my checking account. Who needs those cards anyhoo....
________________________________ From: authfriend <jst...@panix.com> To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com Sent: Saturday, October 1, 2011 11:51 AM Subject: [FairfieldLife] Re: Greetings from Occupied Wall Street --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, turquoiseb <no_reply@...> wrote: > > --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Bhairitu <noozguru@> wrote: > > > > Since in the US banks will often charge fee for using a debit > > card I use my credit cards usually paying the balance off monthly. > > Just to provide some balance, in the EU no country I > know of would allow a bank to charge for the use of > its debit cards. In the Netherlands, in fact, you > cannot use standard Visa cards to pay for many things > because they (as a corporation) insist on making the > vendor pay for every transaction. Here the vendors > simply refuse, and don't accept the cards. No one > seems to mind the inconvenience, except tourists. > > It's YOUR money. And you're allowing them to charge > you for using it? Duh. Remains to be seen. The monthly debit-card fee some banks are charging is new, and it looks like there'll be considerable customer resistance. Actually, the reason BoA and some other banks are now charging a monthly fee for using debit cards for purchases is that a new federal regulation went into effect cutting the amount banks can charge vendors by almost half--from an average of 44 cents a transaction to a maximum of 24 cents per. Although the effect on individual transactions is negligible, this will amount to a loss of $6.6 *billion* a year in revenue for the banks. (This is in addition to a loss of $5.6 billion due to new restrictions on overdraft fees.) It isn't, of course, a matter of "allowing" the bank to charge whatever it wants for its services. If you want to use the service, you pay the charge. You can complain to your congresscritter, and apparently there's been enough discontent over bank fees to move the federal government to impose some new rules. But with the loss in revenue resulting from the new rules, the banks just figure out how to impose new charges to make up for it. It's a little like the battle to control malware: as soon as the antimalware folks manage to step on one approach, the malware- makers come up with a new one.
