You like your precious "free checking?" I bet you do. More like freeloader checking. Sadly, your "free checking" is hurting the needy banking industry, which is why it is going to disappear.

I mean, it's not like you can just give all of your money to a bank and the bank will loan that money out to to others and charge interest on those loans and thereby make a healthy income off of your money, and in return the least that banks could fucking give us is easy access to our own money which we are letting them hold so that they can make money off it. That's crazy. It's only fair that we pay a special fee in order to gain access to our own money, which is ours, but which is generating income solely for the bank. We already pay ATM fees, of course, as well as general "account maintenance" fees, but that's hardly enough. It wouldn't be equitable if we were not also charged another fee in order to write checks should the extraordinary occasion arise in which we wanted to give some of our own money to someone else. That's a privilege, not a right. From USA Today:

Only 45% of non-interest bank checking accounts are free, down from 65% in 2010 and 76% two years ago, according to a survey released Monday by Bankrate.com. Fees, meanwhile, are rising: The average monthly fee for a non-interest account is $4.37, up 75% from a year ago.

After our socialist Wall Street-owned government modestly limited the fees that banks could charge on debit card transactions, this was, of course, inevitable. Everybody gather 'round and "check" out this quote from Nessa Feddis, senior counsel for the American Bankers Association: "When the government intervenes in markets and eliminates a source of income, a bank, like any other business, has to find some way to make up that lost income."

Oh, I have an idea, Nessa: the banks could take the money that we give them, loan that money out to people, and charge interest on those loans. This way banks would be making money off of our money. And we wouldn't even charge banks a percentage of the profits they were making off of our money! All we'd ask is that we be allowed to access our money easily. It's the world's sweetest deal, for banks!

I suppose it would only be fair if banks paid us a small "fee" to use our money, though. Everything can't be free in this world, banks.

[USAT. Photo: Shutterstock]