It may be time for that speech. You know the one: It isn’t me — it’s you. I’m tired of being taken for granted. There’s too much give and take in our relationship, with me doing all the giving.
That would be the speech in which you tell your bank that you’re leaving.
Plenty of people don’t switch banks. It can be a pain in the neck to go elsewhere, especially if you’ve automated a lot of bills, and you have direct deposit set up. When the French companies Capgemini and Efma released the World Retail Banking Report 2015 earlier this year, based on a survey of 16,000 people in 32 countries, it concluded that 11 percent of customers are likely to leave their bank. That’s not exactly a majority of consumers wanting to leave, although banks have nothing to celebrate: For two straight years, the numbers of consumers expressing a desire to leave has gone up.
Meanwhile, 15 percent of respondents said they wouldn’t refer friends or family to their bank, and 29 percent were unlikely to increase their banking (like requesting loans) with their primary bank.
So what would prompt you to leave your bank? Since every relationship can become stale and fall into complacency, it may be worth thinking about what might drive you away. There may be more reasons than you’d think to break up with a bank.
Your bank nickels and dimes you to death. Actually, this wouldn’t be a problem if we were talking actual nickels and dimes, but banking fees can be onerous. A report by The Pew Charitable Trusts earlier this year concluded that the median overdraft penalty is currently $35, which means that if you buy, say, a lemonade for $5, it could cost you $40. (But if you’re looking for a few more drops of lemonade in those lemons, at least the median has held steady since 2013.)
And it isn’t just overdraft fees that are punitive. “My wife and I dropped Wells Fargo in 2011 when they tried to implement a $15 monthly service fee,” says Sean Coffey, who works as the media and development manager for California Reinvestment Coalition, a nonprofit that advocates for fair and equal access to credit for all California communities.
Not pleased to be paying $180 a year to do their banking, Coffey says that he and his wife instead found a regional bank that didn’t charge a monthly maintenance fee, provided they did direct deposit.
Your bank isn’t very personable. You probably don’t expect your bank manager to invite you to her birthday party, but you don’t want to be kicked when you’re down either. Meghan Kennedy, executive director of the Los Angeles-based nonprofit Epilepsy Education Everywhere, recalls when her bank began penalizing her by charging $5 per month for not having direct deposit.
At the time — it was 2009 — Kennedy, then a librarian, was between jobs.
“I asked for them to waive the fee while I was job hunting, but the answer was no,” Kennedy says. That stung, because she had been a customer for 12 years and had always used direct deposit. This wasn’t the only gripe she’d had about her bank, but it was the last straw.
“I didn’t want to deal with the hassle of finding a new bank and changing everything including my autopays for my bills while job hunting,” says Kennedy, who gritted her teeth and paid the $5.
But a few months later, she landed a new librarian job and could have set up direct deposit and avoided the fee. Instead, feeling unappreciated, she switched to a different bank.
Your bank is a screw-up. If you were error-prone with your money, and your bank decided it was no longer worth keeping you, there’s little doubt you’d be kicked the curb. So why not break it off with a bank if mistakes are constantly being made?
Christina Okubo, who owns a branding consultancy firm in Los Angeles, has done a lot of banking for various clients, using both large banks and credit unions. And it has not all gone smoothly.
“I have experienced many tragic bank errors that have led to changing banks,” Okubo says.
Okubo once deposited $25,000 into an account and later learned the teller somehow put it in the wrong account.
“As I was making the transfer to pay off a large invoice, I was extremely stressed out when I realized there was an error and the funds didn’t appear,” she says. Unfortunately, her bank didn’t share her concern. Okubo was informed that it would take 10 business days to rectify the error.
“This consumed hours of my time on the phone,” Okubo says.
At another bank, she opened up an account. “A week later,” she says, “the branch manager called and asked me to come in again to sign a document because they had me sign the wrong form. Another week later, they called me again — because they had me sign the wrong form, again.”
Once, when Okubo closed a business account due to her frustrations, she asked for a receipt. She was denied.
“He insisted that he could not provide me with a receipt or documentation of any kind … Only after arguing with him did I receive a screenshot of my zero-balance account,” Okubo says. About two weeks later, she discovered that the bank account was not closed.
“This wasn’t the first time that a bank account was closed, only later to discover that it was still open,” she adds.
Your bank isn’t fully tech-friendly. The aforementioned World Retail Banking Report 2015 speculated that many younger customers (in this case, ages 15 to 35) may be leaving their bank because they aren’t satisfied with their bank’s digital services. That was the case for Nate Shivar, now 30, when he switched banks in 2013.
He and his wife cut ties because their accounts wouldn’t sync with their Mint.com budgeting software. “They had some sort of technical redirect that prevented access,” says Shivar, who is an SEO and digital marketing consultant in Atlanta.
They loved Mint.com more than their bank, says Shivar, who had been a customer since high school. He also adds that his bank at the time didn’t have mobile deposit — all the more reason to leave.
But that Shivar’s old bank wasn’t synced into Mint.com, a well-known budgeting service, isn’t surprising, according to Okubo.
“Many banks aren’t innovating,” she says, while others “are attempting to grow too fast.” Of the latter, she says that they buy up smaller banks, but those branches aren’t “brought up to speed in terms of the parent bank practices, procedures or protocol.”
She also feels that some banks use their resources poorly. Okubo says that one bank she knows of invests heavily in customer service, in which the tellers are trained to be very empathetic toward customers, but “the way everything actually works, or doesn’t work, is horrible — as if no one has thought things through.”
Which is when it’s often time to find a new financial institution. You may occasionally overspend and, as they say, break the bank. But the bank is not supposed to break you.
More from U.S. News
10 Ways to Save on Your Wardrobe
12 Habits to Help You Take Control of Your Credit
Your Month-to-Month Guide to Savings
Is It Time to Change Banks? originally appeared on usnews.com
