Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Convenience Fees Make Me Angry

I apologize in advance that this is more of a rant than a blog post but....


I HATE CONVENIENCE FEES!

Bank of America holds my mortgage and for me to pay my bill online, they just instituted a $3 online transaction fee. Ugh. I purchased concert tickets to celebrate our 2nd wedding anniversary last month and was charged a $10 convenience fee from LiveNation. Double ugh. If you have less than a $5 at some restaurants that you'd like to put on your credit card, they charge you 50 cents! All these little annoying additions to what you're already spending add up, and I don't like it. Not at all.

For the most part, I can avoid convenience fees. I can mail my mortgage payment, I can avoid purchasing from places that charge for minimum purchases (or carry cash, but you know how that goes for me), and I can get cash from my bank's ATM instead of getting charged double if I use another bank's.

But it's just really, really annoying.

Does anyone else despise convenience fees? What one do you find most annoying? Do you pay them so life's easier or do you do things the hard way to save some bucks?

4 comments:

  1. And this is why we left Bank of America with our mortgage! That is just awful!!! We were going to pay half our mortgage on the 15th and the 30th of each month to try and save on interest, but they wanted to charge $8 per month to have a bi-monthly payment. No thank you!

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  2. +1, refi to someone else - paying online saves them money, they should give you a discount and not a fee (my insurance co, Allstate, actually does this, as do my student loans).

    Charging a credit card fee is against the merchant agreement and would get the restaurant in trouble with Visa/Mastercard. They can have a minimum payment though.

    I'll put in a word for LiveNation and ATM fees, though. Providing those services isn't free, and if they didn't charge you a fee the service wouldn't be available at all. Even with a bank branch, where they have the ATM anyway, they still have to connect it to every other bank and the networking and security to do that is not trivial.

    The one I hate the most is TicketMaster. They have a monopoly so they completely gouge you on the price. I still don't understand how they haven't been persecuted by the DoJ (and yes I know the difference between persecuted and prosecuted - TicketMaster should get both).

    Mostly, though, I avoid them. When I open any account I look at the fees as a key decision point which helps a lot.

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  3. I hate them as well. THe atm fees are the worst, because sometime my bank isn't around and I need cash and so there you go. But you get hit TWICE--by the ban you're using and your own bank, so taking out $20 can cost you an extra $5 in fees. It makes me ANGRY

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  4. I hate things like that! I won't take any credit card with a fee and I'd do the same with my bank account. It's ridiculous that they charge that on your mortgage! I figure with the "going green" stuff that might change. No one is going to go paperless if it ends up costing them in the end!

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