Bank of America’s ridiculous maintenance fee

29 February 2012 Update: Monthly maintenance fees and bank fees in general by Bank of America and others have only gotten worse since I originally wrote this post. While you may still be able to get the occasional fee waived through customer service as I did in February 2010, it may be worth considering other options to avoid fees. I think the best checking option without a monthly maintenance fee is ING Direct’s Electric Orange, which I recently reviewed. In that post I discuss how the account has no maintenance fees and other features, detail what I see are some of the drawbacks of the account, and also provide a link for a $50 bonus for opening an account. Below is my original post regarding the Bank of America Monthly Maintenance Fee.

One thing I hate is bank fees, which is why I’m particularly annoyed at Bank of America right now. My wife and I have a MyAccess checking account, which we opened online in 2004. We do most of our banking through an online bank, but keep this account for branch and ATM access (cash withdrawals, depositing miscellaneous checks and dollar coins, etc.). Because this isn’t our primary checking account, we choose not to have our direct deposit sent there and instead do an automated transfer for a nominal amount from another account to fake the direct deposit and avoid a $8.95 monthly maintenance fee.

Unfortunately for us, this isn’t foolproof. When we opened our monthly statement for February, we saw that we had been charged the $8.95 monthly maintenance fee. This was partially because we forgot to reset our automated transfer (our system makes us reset the transfer after so many months) and partially because the statement closed four days earlier than it did last month. We had another electronic transfer hit the account, but only after the statement for the month had closed.

Not ready to admit defeat, I call customer service to request a fee waiver. True to their usual level of no-service, the automated system said there was a long wait to speak to a rep and then uncerimoniously disconnected the call. So I then used the online chat to request the credit, and only after requesting a supervisor did I get the fee waived.

While I was waiting for the online customer service rep, I just happened to review what the fee structure was on my account if I were opening the account today. Guess what? If you open online, there is no monthly maintenance fee or direct deposit or minimum balance requirement. Armed with this I asked if I could have these terms applied to my current account I was told that was only for new accounts, and when I asked if I would have to close the old account and open a new account to avoid the monthly fee I was told that is what I would need to do. What a waste!

So here’s my dilemma: do I close this account (I am out of paper checks anyway, but I think 5+ years to use 50 checks is a decent run) and open a new Bank of America account to simply avoid the fee, or do I tell Bank of America to go screw and take my business elsewhere? I’ve been trying to simplify anyway, so I am thinking we should just use our credit union account for this type of stuff, but having so many BofA branches around is very convenient, especially when trying to spread around those dollar coin deposits. What to do?