The concept of George Bailey’s cozy little savings and loan in It’s a Wonderful Life today is as hokey as the movie itself. By and large, banking has becoming cold and impersonal. If you have money, banks love you, and if you don’t, they barely even let you in the door.
A friend of mine recently said to me that being a college student is much akin to living in poverty. This is true. We have limited funds, tight budgets, and high risks of going broke and having to beg our parents to send money. Big banks consider us irrelevant.
In light of the pressures surrounding finances, one would think that the university would be sympathetic. Instead it seems they are rather negligent on the whole. By using Fleet Bank as our banking vendor and actively promoting their accounts, the university is an accomplice to the siphoning of student’s hard-earned money every day.
Fleet is a gigantic bank that has 1,500 branches and over 3,000 ATMs in the Northeast. It is also one of the biggest gougers of student funds. The Fleet “Student Self Service Checking” account charges a monthly fee of $5. Over the ten months that they expect your account to be active you will have lost $ 50. Add two more months of fees onto that, if you have any activity in your account during the summer. (Ridiculously, they want you to freeze your assets for two months and deposit all of your paychecks when you get back to school.) This is an enormous amount of money to spend on having Fleet give you the privilege of taking your money.
Now, many of us have banks at home or here that do not charge these fees. My bank in Pennsylvania, Commerce Bank, gave me a checking account with zero monthly fees. People’s Bank, based in Bridgeport and with locations all around town, offers students monthly fee-free banking also.
The solution to this is boycott. Rip up your Fleet letters and cancel your accounts for free accounts that give you the same benefits. Of course, everyone will occasionally have to break down and use the ATM and suffer the $1 fee for it. But, paying a few ATM fees here and there to the Fleet machine is far better than paying $5 a month. Other than that, use debit cards and try to get cash back for free at supermarkets. Stop throwing your money away.
As for the university, I encourage administration to engage in dialogue through this paper. I also issue a call to duty to provide fair banking and maybe even support a local concern like People’s based in our neighbor city, Bridgeport. In the end who are you to charge us $30,000 a year and then encourage us to waste our money?
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