overdraft

Chances are you've been pitched a retail card more than once. Usually it goes something like this: "Will you be saving 10% using your [name of store] card today?" The hope is you'll find the prospect of a discount alluring enough to sign up. But should you?

Americans feeling disenchanted (or worse) with their banks after years of ever-increasing fees are increasingly turning to a cheap alternative tool provided by the world's largest retailer: the Walmart MoneyCard.

Practically nobody ever reads the disclosures that came with a bank account, and that's no surprise -- they average 111 pages long. That's way too much fine print, say Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Jack Reed (D-R.I.), who are calling on banks to cut those disclosures down to just one easy-to-comprehend page.

A year after the Federal Reserve enacted new rules to rein in abusive bank overdraft practices, fees remain high and some institutions actually have slapped on additional penalties, according to a new survey by the Consumer Federation of America.

The consumer advocates at the Center for Responsible Lending have released a checklist of tough questions people should ask their banks to make sure their needs are being met -- and and to ensure they aren't paying unnecessary fees.

At $32 a pop, the overdraft fees at the Heartland Cafe in Chicago kept adding up. During the past 18 months -- the tally had reached $118,000, or about 3,600 separate charges. That's about 200 overdraft charges per month. Co-owner Michael James says he finally realized about six months ago that...

A federal judge in California ordered Wells Fargo to pay $203 million back to customers and to change its "unfair and deceptive business practices" that led customers to pay multiple overdraft fees. U.S. District Judge William Alsup said Wells Fargo engaged in profiteering by processing checks,...

New rules that kick in this August require banks to substantially change one of their most-loathed policies: automatic enrollment in an overdraft "protection" plan that lets a transaction you don't have money to cover go through, then zings you with a $35 fee. The rules mandate that people will...

Let's get the obvious out of the way first: We don't want you to overdraw your checking account. Spending more money than you actually have is not ideal, to say the least, and always winds up costing you more -- sometimes much more -- in the long run. But banks made more than $38 billion in...

Even though taxpayers bailed out the banks with billions of dollars, banks continue to look for ways to sock it to us. The latest increases involve just pennies if you look at only one ATM transaction, but the banks make billions given the volume of those transactions. In fact Bankrate.com...