Trusted friends, or profit-driven giants?

updated 1:44 p.m. ET Jan. 31, 2006

NEW YORK - Banks and credit card companies like to portray themselves as trusted friends, our partners in financial life. But the reality is that these financial institutions are profit-driven friends of convenience whose relationship with you is riddled with trip wires and fees contrived to extract just a little extra at every turn.

In the old days, the tradeoff was pretty straight-forward. Banks provided their services just so you would keep your money with them. You loaned your money to the bank so it could lend it to someone else for profit and they usually would pay you a nominal amount of interest.

More recently, banks have seized upon fees as a lucrative stream of supplemental profit. First they invented service charges for account "maintenance" or exceeding a set number of transactions in a month. Then, as their creative powers waned, they just began jacking up their existing fees.

The results are impressive, even if fee revenue is still dwarfed by interest as the top source of income for banks. Service charges doubled over the past decade, totaling $31 billion in 2004 among the nation's 8,855 regulated financial institutions, according to SNL Financial LC of Charlottesville, Va. By contrast, interest from loans and securities came to just over $400 billion in 2004, a gain of 25 percent since 1994.

The fee fest continued in 2005, totaling $25.8 billion in just the first nine months of the year, suggesting another double-digit increase.

This is not merely a rant against bank fees. It's more about the "gotcha" attitude that developed along the way. Consider, for example, this scenario: The automatic debit for your mortgage hits your checking account on the fifth of every month, the same day two small insurance payments of about $25 each are deducted automatically. Now, let's say one month there's not enough in the account for the mortgage, but enough to cover both insurance payments twenty times over.

So what happens? The mortgage payment bounces, triggering a $30 penalty for insufficient funds. Painful, but fair enough since it's your mistake. But most mainstream banks then employ some creative arithmetic, pretending you don't have sufficient funds for the two small insurance payments either. And because your bank is such a reliable friend, it will cover those payments as a courtesy, then add two more bounce fees, or $90 altogether.

The explanation isn't very convincing. It's common practice in the industry that when multiple checks or electronic debits are presented for payment on the same day, they are deducted from your account balance from largest to smallest. The rationale, banks say, is that the largest tends to be for important matters such as the rent or a car loan, as opposed to membership dues for the gym or a small IOU to a friend.

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