ATM Service – Service Convenience Without Cost Convenience?

ATM service has really made life a song for me! Since the time banks started offering it to this day, there are very few situations when I’ve had to stay for long hours in a bank customer queue to withdraw money or to find out my account balance. I simply visit an ATM counter of my bank and withdraw money or take a printed statement of the amount of money in my account. When I am out of town, I have absolutely no hassles in withdrawing money because there are ATM counters everywhere, even though some of them may belong to different banks. But all this convenience comes at a cost you know, and the point to be considered is whether you can afford it.

I was taken aback when I came to know from a Billshrink infographic that the ATM fee business amounts to a whopping $2 billion industry! You are not mostly aware of the amount of money that you pay for the ATM service. Or, you simply ignore the charges taking them as too trivial. But if you add the amount that you might have paid up till now on a monthly or annual basis, you’ll probably realize that you’ve shelled out quite a bit of your hard earned money as a fee.

The infographic shows the hike in the fee in the recent year. The average fee for using the ATM of another bank has been hiked from $1.78 in 2008 to $1.97 in 2009 per transaction. Are you ready to pay up $0.19 as fee every time you access the ATM of another bank? Here’s how I plan to save up on this. I’m going to withdraw a bit more money than I need at any given point of time so that if I have to go out of town or if the ATM machine of my bank goes out of order, I will not have to visit the ATM machine of another bank for withdrawing money. 72 % banks, if not all are charging this fee. You have to contact your bank to find out if it does.

The fee for ATM services from your home bank has also been hiked from $1.25 to $ 1.46! For frequent users of the ATM service, this fee takes away a significant chunk of the savings. Owing to this, I stopped availing ATM services frequently. Instead of visiting 4 times a month, I visit only once and withdraw the money required for my expenses for the entire month.

In the good old days, banks were very generous with their ATM services. They allowed you to access their ATMs as well as the ATMs of other banks without charging a fee for that. But now, with the increase in ATM usage, like so many other business entities, banks started charging a fee. Maybe the high price of machine and maintenance costs of $21,000 – $75,000 is compelling them to do that. But for a customer, this certainly seems quite unaffordable.

Service convenience should come with cost convenience. Otherwise you can hardly call it a convenience, right?