DMSFCA

I'm sure this gets bashed every few months, but I thought I would bring it up again:

If you travel all over the world and use ATMs a lot, you get whacked for fees frequently. I've had a Wells Fargo (California) account for years and now that I use Microsoft Money to keep track of things, I was able to get some insight into what I knew existed, but didn't want to recognize: ATM fees/surcharges and how big they get.

Sooo... in the year 2004 I had nearly $400 in ATM fees. It seems you use an ATM and they ATM nicks you for a couple of dollars, and Wells knocks you back with a couple, too. God help you if you use an ATM in a Casino, I've seen surchages up to $8! Plus, Wells now gets you for using your ATM at POS terminals and grocery stores, too.

I don't have a small change college-checking type account at Wells, I have a checking/MMA with a pretty good amount of liquid in that savings, like $50k or so, so these charges aren't because my account is dipping below the $100 mark. I suspect that Bank of America is the same way.

I looked all over and ended up opening another checking account at First Republic Bank, who claims that with a $2500 balance, you never get any ATM fees, on either side, unlimited.

Lots of the banks I looked at either allowed a finite amount of foreign ATM usage, or the refunded THEIR fees, but not the foreign ATM, which kind of make sense. I think I became an expert at reading the fine print.

Sooo… I’ve been using this First Republic Bank ATM card all over the place and have been looking at the statements, and sure enough, they seem to be rebating all of the ATM fees. I’ll make a withdrawal out of some 7-11 type machine for $200 and it will come through as $202 on my statement ($200+$2 fee) and First Republic deposits the $2 back into my account. The card is also a Visa debit, so you can use it like traditional plastic, which I think everyone does now.

This would seem idea for the road warrior or really anyone who travels a lot and doesn’t want to deal with ATM fees.

The negatives:

- Limited locations (California, but even limited then, several branches in San Francisco).

- Limited “home” ATMs means that deposits have to be either mailed in, wire-transferred, direct deposit or you can actually use a network of “shared” ATM machines that allow you to make deposits into FRB even though they are owned by someone else. There is a link to a listing on their web site and they are sparse, only a few here in San Francisco, don't know about elsewhere.

- Online banking looks kind of rudimentary. Functional, but not nearly as polished as, say, Wells Fargo’s. Citibank has one that is really functional, lots of stuff you can do, but also looks pretty “basic” and navigating takes a little getting used to. E*Trade is, well, confusing, if you have it mixed in with a securities account.

- The whole dark-green motif looks a little tired compared to some of the other shiny ATM cards out there, but big deal.

I've only stepped in a branch twice - once to open the account, once to change my pin, so I can't speak much for the service, other than it was prompt and friendly.

Anyway, I don’t work for them or in any way have any sort of connection to them, other than I’m a new customer who is kicking the tires to see if they back up what they advertise, and they seem to, so I thought I’d share this with other road warriors.

I’d love to hear from anyone else who has stumbled along this path and see what they have found - I can't be the only one who groans over this!

--Doug