Nice and Not Nice...

So today I read a headline off of CNN (I think) and it said “Big Banks Try To Make Nice”. I will admit that I didn’t read the article. I am just arrogant and judgmental enough to believe I didn’t need to. I have been in that situation and have had my opinions for many years now.

My philosophy has always been rather simple when it comes to “making nice” or being respectful in general. My phrase of choice to describe my feelings is this: A person who is nice to you, but not nice to the waiter, is not a nice person.

This can be applied to many different areas of concern, banking being one of them. Back in the day when I was a poor hard working minion, I couldn’t afford to bank with a big bank. Weather it was First Union, Wachovia, Bank of America (for whom I even worked for 6 years), or countless others. If you didn’t have $X amount of collateral, assets or worth, they would charge you exorbitant fees to utilize their holier-than-thou services. Services that the upper financial class got for free. As a logical person, this made no sense to me. You are charging the people who are just starting out or having a difficult time financially and who are the ones who obviously cannot afford it, and yet you are giving the services away for free to those who could easily afford to pay for them.

As I got older I began to understand the logic that the banking industry used in choosing the threshold at which they charged for services and that at which they didn’t, I am a business major after all. But understanding it never got me any closer to agreeing with it. To this day I think it is a low-down dirty shame.

My turning point came one day about 15 years ago when I did my banking with First Union. I had about $17 in that account. Money was tighter than my jeans after a Friendly’s ice cream sundae with peanut butter and hot fudge topping. Every month I was charged a fee for not maintaining a minimum balance and every month I hated that they took that fee right out of my account. Well that month the fee was $18 and they took my very last dime. In addition to 10 other dimes that I didn’t have. I had to borrow $20 from my sister and pawn my keyboard to pay for gas to get to work. It was the only time I ever borrowed money from any one in my life. I would have managed to get to my next payday had they not taken that “maintenance” fee.

Several years later and no longer a person who lived paycheck to paycheck, I opened an account with USAA. I opened it with $25. Just as a test, really. It is a huge hassle to change bank accounts and I didn’t want to make a decision I was going to regret later. Well it was the best decision I ever made. This was a bank that worked with me before I got on my financial feet and you better believe I developed a rockin relationship with them after I got there. From one checking account with $25 in it to nine different accounts from Checking and Savings to IRAs (ROTH and Traditional), to both of my houses and so on.

So to the big banks that are now trying to ‘make nice’ I say this: I am reminded of a line uttered by Julia Robert’s character in Pretty Woman: “Big mistake. Huge.”