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How to avoid monthly service fees with Wells Fargo (Business and Personal)

03 AUG • 2010 2 minutes

I will rant a bit about how pathetic the U.S. banks are, so if you don’t want to read about that, jump down to ‘End Rant.’

Rant

Banks in the US are kind of like the movie industry. They realize that their golden days are over, and will therefor try to squeeze every penny out of you. The two industries are also in denial about the fact that the entire world have gone online and that if they don’t adopt, they will slowly die. Online banking in the U.S. is a joke. In the year 2010, I can still not transfer money between two different banks online. I can’t even do a wire transfer online. Well, maybe that’s a good thing, given the pathetic security. Your bank records are not more secure than the average web service.

End Rant

Have you ever seen a message saying “MONTHLY SERVICE FEE” on your banking statement? If you bank with Wells Fargo, chances are you have. Luckily, there is a simple fix for it. All you need to do is to set up a scheduled transfer from your checking to your savings-account and back every month. That’s it. For a personal account, you will need to transfer $75 back and forth, and for business it’s $100.

Pretty silly, I know, but it’s well worth a few minutes to save you a few lattes a month.

Here’s how you do it. Log into your account, click “Schedule an automatic transfer” in the left bar under “Transfers & Payments.” Once there, just schedule the transfer as described above.

When done, the result should look something like this:
Wells Fargo Monthly Fee

Note: I can not guarantee that this works in any way. It works for me, and I have an account with Well Fargo in California.

Update 2: I’m pretty confident this doesn’t work anymore.

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