Banks make loads (and I mean loads) of money. And there's absolutely no need for us to give them more money as a gift.
One of the things you can do very easily is stop paying fees
What is a "line fee" anyway?
Or a "direct channel fee"? If it's direct – why is there a fee?
In short – this is money that really goes down the drain, and that's a shame.
In principle – we should be paying zero (zero, 0, Zero) current-account (Over VeShav) fees. If the bank charges us a few shekels a month – not critical. But if it's several tens of shekels – that's a shame. That's money you can do something with: buy something you feel like, go to a café, or invest it, and in general – it's really annoying!
So what do you do?
Toward the end of the first quarter of each year, at roughly the same time the Form 106 comes out, at least for the employees among us, the bank issues a document called the "annual bank statement of fees" ("bank ID", Teudat Zehut Bankait). You can download the short version. If you're like me, a bit odd, and like reading documents of this kind – enjoy. If you're normal people and don't really like the genre, go straight to section 4, where it says how much the bank charged us in fees this year. Further down the page there is a detailed guide to downloading the document; it's recommended to do this from a computer and not from your phone.
It looks like this:
You can see, for example, that this account paid just a few shekels in current-account fees over the entire year. Perfectly reasonable numbers.
What to do if we see different numbers there?
Tens of shekels a month? As already said – it's simply a shame and simply annoying.
In such a case – it's recommended to write the following text in the app under "Contact us":
Hello,
I recently checked my annual bank statement of fees and discovered that last year I paid X shekels in fees.
I checked with Bank Y and they offered me an account with no fees at all for two years. I would appreciate it if you could stop charging me fees.
Thank you very much
Name________
It's highly recommended to do a similar check of our card fees as well, and here too, if the amount of fees is greater than zero – write a similar message under "Contact us" at the credit card company.
Bottom line – we all have enough unnecessary expenses in life. Subscription fees for something we have no idea what it is, duplicate insurance, and so on and so forth. Bank fees are one of the simpler things to deal with; it's a shame to just throw this money away
And as promised – a guide to producing the annual bank statement of fees:
Step 1: Log in to the account and go to "Reports and confirmations"
Step 2: Choose the line "Annual reports – bank ID"
Step 3: Make sure you're on the past year and click "View short annual report (download file)"
That's it. That simple!!
Come on – go save money, move it from the bank's pocket into ours, where it belongs!