This Banking Stuff Is Out Of Hand.

So I'm finished paying off my car this weekend. Which I thought was a good thing. Apparently my bank thinks that's a bad thing. I've had an account with them for 7 years and have never paid a fee for my checking account. Which is why I was surprised to find an 8 dollar monthly fee when I checked my account today. Apparently some time in the past two years they changed up all their rules and now have a bunch of different checking account levels. I don't care, I mostly just want somewhere for my paychecks to land before they get cut up and fed to various other entities. And the reason I could not care for so long was that if your accounts and loans totaled more than $10,000, they waived this $8 fee for swankified checking, or whatever its called. Now that I've paid back the loan, I no longer get a free ride. I'm pretty sure I don't use any of the features of this value added-status (aside from the .05% higher APY, woohoo!) so I called them up to see if I needed to downgrade or what, cause there's no damn way I'm paying you to hold my money.

Turns out there's another route into the gratis high-roller's checking club. You need to have direct depost, E-statements, and online bill pay enabled and they'll waive the monthly fee. Okay, I already do the first two cause I want less paper and I haven't done bill pay because it seems like adding a paper transaction for things I already do electronically. But they're sending the paper to someone else, so what do I care? (I actually hope that they can take care of most of these things electronically too) Whatever, at first glance this does seem marginally easier with all the payees on one page (after I set them all up) but I never really had any trouble remembering to pay three bills on three different websites. So I'm signed up for online bill pay which costs $5.75 a month but is free if you've got this super-platunim player's checking account that online bill pay makes free... seems nonsenically cyclical and backwards, are you sure I'm reading this right?

So essentially you'd charge me more money if I took advantage of fewer of your services, and less money if I make you do more work? Yeah, I know its really about locking me in to the institution to make changing banks more of a hassle. (which is why they weren't worried about me leaving when I had a loan) But honestly the only thing that made me think about leaving in 7 years was your 'incentive' to stay. Seems a little effed up if you ask me.