The North Carolina Bankruptcy Information Blog

As you made your New Year’s resolutions to dispense with debt and start on the road to saving, it appears many American banks made their own commitments to upping customer fees and, in the process, further padding their coffers in 2011.

In fact, according to a new article from The New York Times’ Ron Lieber, “Earlier this month, Bank of America announced its intent to test a number of different monthly fees for customers in some states, depending on the balance in their accounts or other relationships with the institution. Right before the new year, meanwhile, JPMorgan Chase informed customers that under certain circumstances it would add monthly fees to many of the accounts it inherited from the now-deceased Washington Mutual.”

Banks are justifying these fee increases by blaming federal regulators, regulators who, in reality are actually making fees lower, or, at least, as Lieber describes it, more transparent.…

We all know that credit cards, with their excessive fees, high interest rates, and unforgiving fine print, can be the key to financial ruin…as well as many a personal bankruptcy filing. But now there’s a new unfriendly financial cost on the horizon: debit card fees.

These normally safe and fiscally responsible alternatives to their costly cousin, the credit card, are now coming into focus as the latest instrument by which banks are placing higher fees on unsuspecting consumers. The reason? New rules from the Federal Reserve poised to cut the amount banks can charge merchants for debit transactions.

And according to a new article in Raleigh’s News and Observer, these new rules for banks could mean new costs eventually passed on to you.  While we don’t normally notice these “swipe fees,” as they’re added into what retailers charge for goods and services, what we could expect are higher transaction fees or fewer benefits from banks looking to recoup what they’ll be losing in lost retailer “swipe” revenues.…

Debit cards are one of the many spending tools that can be good for a person rebuilding after bankruptcy. For the most part, anything that is backed directly by actual cash is the best way to ensure that you don’t get too deep again shortly after things are back in order.

There are some drawbacks to using a debit card though. Mainly, it won’t do much to re-establish your credit because it does not rely on credit and therefore won’t have any affect on your credit score. Debit cards are backed by a checking account with actual cash that gets debited according to what you spend.…

Bankruptcy and personal money management are tightly intertwined. As you read through the blog you will probably notice that a lot of our posts will offer advice and tips on saving, how to avoid scams and general philosophies about preserving financial stability.

Here is another post about how to hang on to more of your money, which is especially useful for anyone coming out of bankruptcy or performing some initial research. These tips involve banks, which many people believe want to help you with saving money. However, that is not always the case. In fact, it’s becoming quite the opposite.

Banks (and credit card companies) are in attack mode.…