It is not what you expect but what you inspect. I noticed that my Wells Fargo basic business account charged me a $12 “monthly service fee” when I was looking over my statement.
Apparently, in order for the fees to be waived, I need either: a $6,000 average balance (calculated per day) or be enrolled with their merchant services (the cheapest plan is $30 a month) or business payroll transaction
Since I have no employees, don’t want to pay $30 a month to save $12 and will never put $6,000 in a checking account earning no interest, it sounds like it’s time to find another option.
To give Wells Fargo some credit though, I spoke with a banker and he told me not to worry too much about the fees because he will waive them manually for me. The bad part? I have to ask them every month.
The hour visit to my bank sparked me to look at my other Wells Fargo accounts. To my surprise, I found two monthly bill pay fees for $6.95. Again, they manually waived those fees for me and helped me call another department to have the “feature” cancelled since I haven’t used it since 2007 (currently, I use FNBO Direct’s bill pay feature because I can keep my money in a savings account until last minute).
When was the last time you checked your bank statements
I didn’t appreciate Wells Fargo charging me these fees without notification at all but I’m thankful that the banker was nice enough to waive them. If I never check my statements, I would be short $18.95 ($12 + $6.95) every month.
Since the weekend is coming up and you should have some time, why don’t you check your statements? Just pay special attention to: recurring charges; any line item that has the word “fee”; checks that don’t have a description.
It really doesn’t take that long but the exercise might help you recover some lost money. If you do find erroneous charges though, remember to be polite and nice to the bank representatives because he/she:
Is there and have the ability to help you; wants to help you (to keep your business); doesn’t want to charge you a fee if they had a choice (it really doesn’t help them to charge you money); is already having a bad day worrying about their job security with all the banking turmoil most likely lost more money than you have in the stock market as they probably own more banking stocks than you do.
