[BartSimpson]

Public_Domain Public_Domain:

"Vote with your wallet" is yet another purposefully deceitful dis-empowering throw-away phrase similar to "vote"

What they really mean to say is "write down your complaints on a piece of paper and shove it up your ass"

They only say this to you because you're special.

[Public_Domain]

[Xort]

One of the jobs of a government that most people accept is the management of currency. I would support the government creating a way to hold and exchange money in without having to use physical notes or coins. We could have digital cash equivalents, with operating costs that reflect actual costs.

Freeing people from having to use private businesses to securely use and transfer currency.

The only people that would have a reasonable objection to a new type of money are, banks and money service industries, and people with an ideological objection to the government doing something better than the private sector.
~
I'd support a cap on transaction costs at 125% of cost as audited and averaged for the nation.

[bootlegga]

BeaverFever BeaverFever:

$1:

If you don’t want to pay those fees, then there are steps you can take to avoid it. Why is it my problem if you are too lazy to do so?

How is lower ATM fees your problem? Also as I said, many of the supposed steps are not practical - like telling people they can take the morning off work and stand in line if they don't want to pay a \per-transaction fee or buy a monthly 'fee package'. What's next, if commuters don't want to pay a 2000% gasoline tax for any internal-combustion vehicle, they can take a horse a buggy to work?

Also, if you keep a $1,000 float in a simple low-interest chequing account, you're being a sucker. The bank wants you to do that because they're lending that money out at 20% and giving a few pennies in interest. All while pretending to be benevolent by waiving a monthly fee that only exists to recover the paltry interest they're paying you. So you need to keep the amount of money you want to spend in a month, plus 1000 extra in a low interest account. I only keep my spending money in my cheqing; everything else gets trasferred to savings.

As I said, most banks still charge a monthly fee and/or limit the number of fee-free transactions you can use, even at their own ATM.

That's your opinion I guess. I consider leaving a grand in the bank to avoid $50 in banking fees a fair trade.

The thing is that I don’t use debit for anything – to me that is the real sucker’s game. I use no annual fees credit cards which pay dividends for everything, then pay them off fully at the end of the month. Each year, the banks pay me hundreds of dollars to use their credit cards for FREE.

BeaverFever BeaverFever:

$1:

2. It is a convenience if you aren’t willing to walk/drive/bike to your branch instead of just grabbing cash from the nearest ATM. That is the very definition of convenience – the ATM is here, not two blocks away.

That makes sense for why the OTHER BANK charges you a fee, but why does YOUR bank charge you a fee for using some other ATM? They aren't providng you anything!

Actually they are – they are letting you use another bank’s machine to do your banking. I have no doubt that someone withdrawing money from another bank adds another layer of effort to maintaining your bank account – things like identity theft, stolen cards, etc. can happen because someone uses your cards irregularly.

I’m also fairly sure that Interac and the other network connection services that connect our banks aren’t free either (just like VISA & Mastercard), so the bank is passing along those costs to you. I don’t know if you’re old enough, but I remember the days when you couldn’t just go to any ATM – you could only go to certain ones on the same network (Interac, Plus, so on) as your bank was. ATMs are far more convenient now than they were 20 years ago. That comes with a cost.

Again, if you don’t want to pay that cost, don’t.

[herbie]

Funny how the Banks can charge a fee on every transaction and it's not seen as a tax. Seem to remember a country that threw tea in the harbour over taxation without representation. They must all have voting shares in the banks they use, eh?