Yvan Seth's Hole in the Internet

On bank fees [SMH]. I actually left a bank back home once when they fined me $40 for trying to withdraw $50 when I only had $30 in my account, they simply declined the transaction at the time and in my next statement I had something like "transaction declined fee" on my statement. I was a student at the time, just making do as best I could on my government handout and $40 was not as trivial as it seems now. The bank was ANZ, I closed my account that week. It amazes me that they felt it was valid to have such a fee for a declined transaction, some negligible amount of computer cycles spent to return an error condition.

ATM fees are another thing, use an ATM even from your own bank and after some small allowance of transactions they start charging you something crazy like $1.50 per ATM use. Use any other bank's ATM and you always pay this fee. In the UK the ATMs charge no fees, and they seem almost apologetic about the fact that my bank might charge me a fee for a transaction because it's foreign and a visa transaction. They ask "Are you sure you want to continue?".

There seem to be a lot more ATMs around here too, never have to go far to look for one. Also, due to there being no fees for using them, you don't have to worry about hunting around to find one of your own bank's ATMs to avoid giving some rich financial institution yet more money.