Never Pay an ATM Fee.

April 11th, 2007 • Related • Filed Under • by admin

When I was very young and first got an ATM card to go along with my newly held checking account, I didn’t make very good use of it. Whenever I thought I needed money, I would take some out and spend it as I pleased. Until I got to college and was forced to be frugal, I blew pretty much everything that came in from my job. I would even take money out at other banks ATMs and pay the fee, what a sucker I was! That’s for sure! You should never pay a fee to use another bank’s ATM, and here’s why.

Let’s say you’re going to take out $20 from an ATM, you shouldn’t have to pay a $2.00 fee to just access your money, that’s ludicrous! That’s like paying 10% interest just to borrow money from yourself! In order to avoid ever paying an ATM usage fee, you have two options.

The first is just to never use an ATM that doesn’t belong to your bank. Pay with a check, your debit card, or carry plenty of cash around with you. If you do a little bit more planning, usually you can easily avoid ever having to go near the ATM of another bank! Just think about when you’ll need to spend cash in the near future, and just make sure there’s plenty of money in there for when you need it.

If you’re just not a good planner and are going to end up using other bank’s ATMs, consider opening a checking account at one of the many banks who will actually pay for the fees that other banks charge you for using their ATMs. Not all of them will do this, most certainly. You’ll have to shop around and find a bank that does. Quite often you can get about $10.00 a month worth of ATM fees refunded. So if you do have to take some money out of your account, your bank will pay for it! A lot of the internet based savings accounts will do this. They don’t have ATMs of their own, but it’s cheaper for them just to refund your fees than build their own network of ATM machines.

ATM fees are not a lot of money, but there’s just no good reason to pay them. A little bit of planning should prevent most of those ATM fees, and if you get a checking or savings account that will refund other bank’s ATM fees, you can prevent ever having to pay an ATM fee.