Avoid the banks’ fee-for-all

Shopping around can save costs

Don’t get held up at the bank. That’s the warning of consumer advocates, who say monthly bank charges are adding up.

“All those unnecessary bank fees can easily suck up your savings if you’re not careful,” according to a report by the CO-OP Credit Unions.

The organization recommends consumers shop around for financial institutions that don’t charge those fees. But some are still digging deep to pay for banking.

“The average bank customer, whose fees have gone up steadily over the past four years, now pays about $150 a year, or $12.83 in average monthly service fees,” according to MoneyRates.com.

The annual fees can add up to an expensive dinner for two at a restaurant, with an average outof-network ATM fee of $2.71, an average overdraft charge of $32.44 and an average monthly checking account fee of $13, according to the CO-OP study.

What should people do avoid losing $150 a year?

Banking experts say they should do the same thing they do on most other purchases: Shop around.

The average bank customer can reduce or eliminate many of those pesky bank charges by using newer ways of banking, according to a study by Deposit Accounts.com, which monitors the banking industry.

In its report, DepositAccounts.com said “the most consumer-friendly products were offered by Web-based banks, whose fees were lower than brick-and-mortar banks by about 18 percent.”

Credit unions also offer “a much better deal than banks,” added Ken Tumin, the founder of DepositAccounts.

Tumin says the overdraft to is possibly the worst traditional bank product: “Say you use a debit card to pay for a cup of coffee and you don’t have enough money on your debit card. That can trigger a $25 fee, and it can become the most expensive cup of coffee you ever had.”

He adds that the overdraft protection is a very inefficient way to gain access to credit because the interest rate is very high.

“A big problem of bank fees is that some people have no idea what they’re paying. They need to check their statements,” adds Charles Hughes, a financial adviser.

And an increasing number of consumers are checking their banking fees. A 2015 Pew Research study found that banks are moving away from “consumer unfriendly practices.”

It found that only 10 percent of consumers surveyed used overdraft protection and its high fees in the past year.

Still other people are changing how they bank.

The American Bankers Asso- ciation says most bank customers avoid those bothersome fees by maintaining minimum balances.