It's Our Money - Let Us Do What We Want With It

I have been wanting to write about this for a long time and I am just now getting around to it. Did you know that you are only allowed a certain number of withdrawals/tranfers from your savings account before you accrue a penalty fee. This includes tranfers from your saving to another in house account...within the same bank. When I have a vacation or there is something special I want to buy and I am saving up for it over a matter of time, I would usually transfer some of the money for whatever it was that i wanted, from our checking into our savings account. That way it was "protected and out of the way"...out of our checking account. With it being in savings, I knew that I would not spend the money through the course of normal living and spending throughout the course of the month. Then when I had built up enough to get...let us say....airline tickets...I would transfer the cost of the airline tickets over from our savings account to our checking account and buy the tickets using our bank card. One year I did this around Christmas time. Transferring different ammounts of money from savings to checking when I found a gift that I wanted to buy Veronica. After the end of a statement period, I must have transfered more that 6 times. Because I went over the government mandated 6 transaction rule, I was penalized, I believe it was $20. I am not sure who got this money...whether it was the bank or the government. When I saw this penalty charged to our account, I called the bank up and was told that anyone who withdraws or transfers money more that 6 times from the savings account during a statement period gets the penalty. After doing a little research on line, here is what I found outr about this:

Section 204.2(d)(2) of Regulation D of the Federal Reserve Board:

…the depositor is permitted or authorized to make no more than six transfers and withdrawals, or a combination of such transfers and withdrawals, per calendar month or statement cycle… to another account (including a transaction account) of the depositor at the same institution or to a third party by means of a preauthorized or automatic transfer, or telephonic (including data transmission) agreement, order, or instruction, and no more than three of the six such transfers may be made by check, draft, debit card, or similar order made by the depositor and payable to third parties.

I have a real problem with this. People work very hard for their money and they should have the complete right to put the money in the bank or do what they want with it, ie moving it from one account to another, as they see fit. I don't feel that the government should be penalizing us because we aren't saving our money the way that they want us to. The same government that is penalizing us, is the same goverment that is at least a trillion dollars in debt and hasn't learned how to manage their own money. Doesn't make much sense to me...how about you?

9 comments:

Hena Tayeb said...

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Eunice Argueta said...

I couldn't agree more!!

Barry said...

Once upon a time, when I was very young, there were no such things as bank service charges.

Yes this is true.

Banks made sufficient money from investing your savings that they would cover your service changes, pay you interest and make a reasonable profit from themselves.

Somewhere along the way the idea of a reasonable profit changed, service charges came in and the idea of prudent investment went out the window.

The world in which I grew up now seems very quaint and innocent.

Anonymous said...

It is truly absurd~I agree with you completely. Don't these banks make enough money to operate? Why accumulate more money by hammering upon the working folk?

GREED
Cheers,
Clayrn Darrow
M.IV

Doreen said...

I strongly agree! It's amazing to me how a bank can even charge for some of their services. You have your money in their bank which allows them to collectively use on investments! Why can't we charge them a fee for using our money?

Anonymous said...

My guess is the banks have that money invested and don't want you treating it as another constantly fluctuating checking account.

eleventh hour said...

The fed is not the "government". It is a for-profit private entity. And it controls our economy for its own purposes, not for our good. We may work for our money, but banks don't--they can (and do, and must) create money from nothing by writing loans for amounts that were never deposited with them. They only have to have actual deposits for 10-20% of the money they loan. The rest of the money is just numbers on a computer--until you work for it and pay them back. google "money as debt."

RileyScott said...

Yeah, I hate when I get hit with these stupid fees. My wife and I have separate checking accounts, and use the saving to transfer funds between us. If we do this more then 3 times, they charge us. I mean the money is in there for an hour tops sometimes. They can't have invested it that fast.

Kate060 said...

Just a note - Reg. D and the six withdrawals per month rule affects money market accounts, not regular savings and checking accounts.
Your bank may impose fees and restrictions on the number of withdrawals you may make, but that's their policy.
My bank, for example, has no limitations on the number of transactions I can make from my checking or savings accounts, but it's required to limit transactions on money market accounts because of the nature of that kind of account.
I won't bore you with the particulars, but I can get them for you if you wish.
Also - I've lived through banks charging service fees to eliminating them to re-imposing them as a way to deal with ever-decreasing margins (the difference between what they pay customers in interest and what they make from loan customers in interest.)
Many banks provide most if not all their services for free if your relationship with them is deep enough, in much the same way that buying in bulk costs less per item than buying separately.
Just my two cents worth - and yes, I work for a small community bank in Ohio - the fifth oldest, locally owned, nationally chartered bank in the USA, actually.

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