Wasted Money

Here's a piece from Money that says Americans paid $15 billion in overdraft fees last year. The details:

In 2016, U.S. consumers paid a total of $15 billion in fees for bouncing checks or overdrafting -- which is when a customer tries to make a purchase without enough money in their account to cover the transaction -- according to new data released by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

He also pointed out that the average amount of money consumers overdraft by is about $24 -- but that banks often charge fees of around $34 for each overdraft incident.

I don't know why I'm surprised at stuff like this any longer.

You'd think that after all these years of blogging that I'd have it ingrained how poor Americans are at money management and nothing would shock me.

Then something like this comes along.

$15 billion in WASTED MONEY. That's what this is saying. People spent money they didn't have and ended up not only paying the original bill but actually paid $15 BILLION more.

Ugh. When will these bad decisions end????

Comments

[Anders]

Hey!

I agree with you, this shouldn't surprise anymore, but it still does. I often think of how shockingly little people seem to care or know about their finances. Even such a simple thing as to know how much is in their accounts.

You would think that it wouldn't be so hard today either with all the apps and things that can give us easy access to our financial info.

I guess we're just very slow learners when it comes to our money.

Have a great day and thank you for sharing your thoughts!

[freebird]

That 15B in overdrafts divided into 100M households is something like $150 per household per year on average. It's not chump change, but it pales in comparison to the elephant in the room, namely yesterday's headline "Average US household owes $15,654 in credit card debt". Hopefully most of this is at 0% APR but I would guess it isn't-- if the average is ~10%, then the interest paid by the average household is 10x what they pay in overdraft fees.