Today's Bank Robbers

Today’s Bank Robbers

It use to be when you heard the term bank robber, you thought of guys with masks on their faces and guns in their hands. Today when you hear the term you think of the banks as the robbers. They rob the public by charging outrageous fees. They lure us into getting credit cards and then charge enormous rates of interest. And if we are a day late on our payments they jack up the interest rates. Bank robbers use to go to jail when they were apprehended. Today’s bank robbers receive unheard of bonuses.

You use the automatic teller at a local bank to withdraw twenty dollars and the bank charges you a three-dollar fee for gaining access to your own money. Three dollars doesn’t sound like much. But, what if you withdraw cash four or five times a month. In a year that’s over a hundred and fifty dollars.

I wrote a ten-dollar check to pay the co-payment for a doctor’s visit. I wrote the check on the 27^th of the month. The bank received it on the 30^th. My checking account had only eight dollars in it. The bank charged me a twenty-seven dollar fee for overdrawing my account even though my retirement check is automatically deposited to the bank on the first of the month. My retirement check has been going directly to my checking account for the past five years. I have been banking with the same bank for over thirty years. Still, they charged me a twenty-seven dollar fee for being over drawn two dollars for one day.

My granddaughter while off to college opened a checking account with a local bank. She over drew her account by two dollars. She ignored the notices that were sent to her mother’s house. Over a period of three months she was charged a hundred dollars in late fees. And, the sticky part is that you have to pay the fees are you will ruin your credit rating. She has friends at college who have been charged as high as thirty dollars for overdrawing their accounts by as little as ten dollars. And, they had covered the over draw within a week.

The banks overwhelm you with credit card offers. I get as many as three or four offers a week. They go straight to the trash, but some times I am tempted. College kids get even more offers and are less likely to resist the temptation.

My granddaughter received several offers for a five hundred dollar credit card. She had to deposit five hundred dollars of her own money into the account. She then would be eligible to borrow up to five hundred dollars. The bank would charge her nineteen percent interest to borrow her own money. They assured her that the amount that she could borrow would go up over time.

Credit card interest rates are supposed to be linked to the prime interest rate. But over the past year as the prime rate has dropped banks are actually increasing their interest rates on credit cards. And, they never inform you when they raise their rates.

Most customers with good credit are paying as high as twenty percent interest rates especially if they use their credit cards for cash advances. Those who miss payments can be charged as much as much as thirty percent in interest. There is no federal limitation on the amount of interest that a bank can charge at the present time. In addition to high interest rates, banks charge annual fees that can be as high as one hundred dollars a year.

If you pay $200.00 a month on a ten thousand dollar credit card loan, in ten years you will have paid $24,000 in interest. And, probably the loan will still have a balance. That is more than double what you had borrowed. Think how bad it would be if you had fifty thousand dollars in credit card debt. At twenty percent you would have paid $120,000 in ten years. Again, more than double the amount you borrowed.

A friend of mine found that the bank had added a twelve- dollar a month fraud protection fee to his account. He called the company and cancelled the fraud protection. A few weeks later the bank notified him that he was no longer eligible to receive further credit on his card. We need protection from the banks more than we need protection from fraud.

Most people who use credit cards pay the minimum amount due. If you owe more than ten thousand dollars on your account and just pay the minimum, you will never pay your card off. Of course, that is just what the bankers want someone who is in debt to them for the rest of his or her life.

In the old days, bank robbers went to jail when they were apprehended. Today the executive officers of the banks that are robbing the public blind, receive huge bonuses. The average bonus for bank executives in 2008 was $112,000. And that is on top of the enormous salaries that they receive. Nine of the top banks in the U.S paid out over one hundred and thirty three billion dollars in bonuses. According to an article that I found on Goggle, top bank executives were earning an average of $15,000 an hour. And these are the same people who argue that we cannot afford to raise the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour.

It is your own fault if you get into credit card debt many people would argue. And to a large extent this is true. Yet, many people myself included have given in to the urge to spend more than they earn. I can remember my father saying, “It’s not what you earn, it’s what you save that counts.” He grew during the depression of the 1920’s and learned the hard way the value of saving money.

Coming of age in the 1960’s, I like so many of my peers gave in to the adage that next year would always be better. I should give in to the needs for self-gratification and buy things that I wanted rather than just the things that I needed and the things that I could afford. I should spend to get my children and grandchildren the things that I never had. I could pay off my debts in the future. Next year would always be better, I thought. Like so many of my peers, I bought the lies that they told us. I allowed the bankers to hold me up, and I am still paying for my lack of fortitude.