Today, I went to the bank.

Why banks charge fees. (#Day44)

Today, I went to the bank.

Deposit a check? Check. No problem.

The issues arose when I shared my intention to close a business account that was over 4 years old.

With only $~300 in the account, I didn’t expect there to be any problems. It was in this moment that I was sat down to the side with an agent in consumer banking.

I was told that, since June 2015, the bank had been charging a $14 fee each month to our business account, thereby totaling $126 in fees.

Flabbergasted, I sat in awe.

No one told me about these fees. Perhaps it was mentioned in some obscure letter I may have received in the mail while moving twice since last June.

Really, the principal is what bothered me.

The bank charges fees, regardless, because “once the business account is below the account minimum of $1500, a $14 monthly fee applies.” Also, “while this may not have been the case in 2011, it is the case now”.

Could our account have been grandfathered in to this? Yes, easily. Were we? Nope.

That bank, in my opinion, stole some of our money.

Why did they do this, you may ask?

Actually, I don’t blame them. Large banks have to maintain accurate and secure costly data-warehouses and pay thousands of employees salaries of $50,000-$120,00-ish (or a lot more) EACH, and provide medical benefits, too.

The bank was performing its legal duty to serve its shareholders best. After all, banks have to generate revenue…and particularly due to the Patriot Act, they have to retain a Locus of control.

With Bitcoin, a situation where a consumer would blindly be charged a fee is not possible.

Sure, it’s possible that some Bitcoin company could charge fees, but the Bitcoin network itself only contains minuscule, like $0.06/transaction, fees.

If you have a business account based purely in Bitcoin, no intermediary institution could steal your money from you. Your account can’t be charged or frozen or controlled arbitrarily by a third party (unless you give someone the responsibility of managing your private key).

Hearing about the accounts in Cyprus getting raided in 2013 resonated with me a lot more after I went to the bank today.

When Caleb C. said on twitter:

“The first day I learned about Bitcoin was the first day of the rest of my life.” #Bitcoin

^This really resonated with me when I first read it (yesterday).

But today, going to the bank (the same one that I sat in to wire money to a BTC exchange in May 2013) and hearing about these very real fees, I knew that the above quote was even more true than I had wanted it to be.

Long live UDoMyWork L.L.C.

And long live “banking”.

#Day44 , #100DaysOfBlogging