3 ms·

I was with you until you got to the part about the usual rebuttal. So you're saying that the average person makes mistakes that result in bank fees, and so any

• ganeumann 12y ago
  1. It's like saying "I don't need auto insurance because I never have accidents." That may be true, so far, and you may be a careful driver, but it's still irrational (that's why they call them accidents, after all.) Insurance against low-probability, high-cost events is rational. (In this case, it's even worse than insuring yourself because insurers make money when you don't have an accident, banks make money when you do, so the incentives are totally misaligned: banks actively try to make it hard for you not to screw up.) 2. If you have a couple of thousand dollars in the bank and you're getting an extra 0.5% on your interest, that's $10 per year. That's far less than the time-cost of just reading your bank's fee schedule every time they change it. The fact is, retail banks make most of their money by charging fees which come as a surprise to the people who pay them. Those people would avoid these fees if they could do so in a reasonable way. Comments that imply that this is not so have to be either misleading, irrational, or just not generally applicable. I went with irrational as the most charitable reason.