With the economy still sputtering and people still wanting their children to have a joyful and memorable Christmas the phrase  overdraft fees is one that you hear quite often.  These fees don’t just occur during the holiday season.  The fees can sneak up and bite a struggling college student who didn’t have enough time to update their ledger for the week because they were all up night studying.  The student then goes to get a sandwich at the student union and then get hit with overdraft fees simply because they wanted to be able to eat and not suffer from hunger as they were taking a test.  I find such fees on a student to be outrageous.  The bank can end up charging the student an extra fifty to one hundred dollars a month over a sandwich.  Are the people who makes these corporate regulations really thinking about the poor and the middle class?  You decide for yourself.  The point is for you to educate yourself before you get one of these cards and to not let people take advantage of you.

It is because practices like these that people like Chase and Bank of America have lost the trust of the people with their pre-paid cards and their minimum payment plans.  The people simply do not trust them anymore and with good reason.  The truth is that only do people like Kenneth Lewis, the former Bank of America Chief Executive Officer take your money with outrageously high overdraft fees, but the taxpayer is also paying his salary for the year thanks to the bank bailout bill, so not only do corporate suits like Lewis steal from the little person as they are walking through the front door, they get you on the way out as well.  You need the people in Congress to ask tough questions about where exactly all of your money is going and whether or not.  Not only does there need to be caps upon the salary compensation, but there also need to be caps on these pre-paid card induced fees.

The question truly becomes where does the average person turn to get justice and get their money back during these tough economic times that are just compounded by overdraft fees?  The answer is nowhere because the average person simply does not have the resources to challenge the general counsels  of these multinational banks.  It is shameful that people could charge a huge four hundred percent fee just because you were late on a few bills as you were making sure you had health care and food on the table.  You certainly don’t get any rest or relief from the credit card companies, given that they practice many of the same misguided policies as the banks.

People simply can not say this is far at a time when unemployment was at its highest levels in a generation and people are losing their homes, that the overdraft fees attached to debit cards for example are what America can tolerate right now.  You should ask tough questions as to why people think these fees are so huge in many situations.  The simple fact is that in many cases this is a situation where the illegal process of usury is happening.  The people who pay taxes and work hard should not be punished for wanting to purchase new things for their children.  There certainly is a part of personal responsibility involved in this situation, but we must not lose track of humanity when we are talking about material or financial items.

Too often in America, the people who are charging fees have lost their sense of humanity and decide to worry more about collecting money from a poor person’s bank account.