4 Overdraft Bank Fees

Banks are raising the cost of overdraft fees to absurd heights, because if you're going to smash your members into financial ruin, it might as well be the ones who habitually have negative account balances.

Exorbitant overdraft fees generated about $35 billion in the last year alone. And the higher the bank's overall revenue is, the higher their overdraft fees are -- at the end of 2012, the average fee charged by banks with revenue of around $25 billion was $35 -- that's 35 bucks every time you go so much as one cent over your account balance. And if you have multiple accounts in the same bank -- say, a checking account and a credit card -- the bank will automatically deduct payments due on one account from your other account. Meaning the bank will overdraw your account itself, and then hit you with the overdraft fee on top of that.