Tanya Brooks-Ford ran the member services desk at a credit union in Charlotte for eleven years, which means she has explained an overdraft fee several thousand times. She writes about everyday banking, bills and the small charges that people stop noticing.
Your bank shows you two numbers and only one of them is real money you can spend today. Confusing the two is behind a large share of the declined cards and surprise fees I dealt…
An account you are not using can still cost you money, and in a small number of cases it can be emptied and handed to the state. Both of those things surprise people, and both are…
I have explained an overdraft fee several thousand times, and I would guess a quarter of those were fees that should never have been charged.
Nobody reads the second page of a cable bill. The companies know that, and the second page is where the money is.
The business model is not complicated. Charge a small amount monthly, make cancelling slightly inconvenient, and rely on the fact that people do not audit their own bank…
A water bill is one of the few bills that will tell you something is physically wrong with your house, if you know which number to look at.