AT&T jams one up the iPad's jacksie

We have what amounts to a religious war in our household: David is a Mac lover, I'm not.

There's irony in this, because I was a diehard Mac fan throughout my formative years. My Dad brought home an Apple IIG in 1989 or so, and for the next decade, I regarded those who didn't use Macs as vaguely inferior life forms.

Then, right around the time Apple seemed to be sputtering off into its grave, I succumbed to the ubiquity of Windows. (This did not stop me from plastering a "snail inside" decal on every Pentium PC I owned. I retained the sly snootiness of an Apple user.) Between office PCs, college computer lab PCs, my campus-job Windows laptop, and my own broke-student inability to afford a new Mac, I drifted off into Microsoftland.

And stayed there. When my job change two years ago brought with it a Mac desktop, I was the only magazine staffer to regard it as an actual work impediment. I fled whenever possibly to my alternate office 20 blocks north, in no small part because my desk there had a Windows machine and was the only place I could actually get work done. I couldn't help it; my brain now worked in c:\Windows\Desktop directories.

Meanwhile, David went full-bore in the other direction. For the first few years we were together, he used my backtop work laptop as his home PC. When I changed jobs, I bribed him to give it up by using my pay raise to buy him his first personal laptop. He chose a MacBook, and within less than 24 hours he was far more attached it to than me. "If I'd know it was this good, I would have skipped eating for a week and spent the money on this years ago!" was, I believe, a direct quote from him. I rolled my eyes.

But for many years now, he's been a Mac addict, with the iPod/iBook/iPhone combo, while I cling to my Windows desktop, archaic Samsung cell phone and Palm PDA. (Stop laughing. I cherish and coddle it. And am in deep, deep denial about it being the end-of-the-Palm-road when it dies.)

One reason I've resisted the siren call of Apple is that I don't like the company's closed tech ecosystem. The Apple experience works really well if you use its approved apps, on its approved hardware, to do approved create-and-consume things, on the network of its approved bandwidth provider. Wander off, and you get shooed back onto the path.

So I was pretty intrigued today to see AT&T make a subtle move with big ramifications: No more unlimited data plans for new iPhone or iPad buyers. Welcome to the world of metered billing.

Which, yes, will probably knock a few dollars of the bill of the average Apple gadget user, if they opt into a pricing tier reflecting the fairly casual data consumption most users have. Now. In 2010.

In a year? Or two? I don't see apps and devices using less bandwidth going forward. And once you're into the land of metered billing, you're not going back. Comcast, Time Warner, Verizon, and all the cable/broadband/etc providers that have been itching to ditch unlimited bandwidth in favor of metered data have got to be doing the dance of joy right now. AT&T fired the first shot over the bow; now the way is cleared for them to launch their own fusillades.

I don't think it'll happen immediately, and I think the upward pricing pressure will be gradual -- after all, no telecom wants to spook Congress into doing anything rash or regulatory -- but I think we're edging toward a future where bandwidth costs are charged by consumption, like electricity or water.

Meanwhile, back on the home front, David has recently discovered the streaming, addictive joys an MLB.tv subscription for his iPhone. Guess who plans to cling to his grandfathered, unlimited data plan for as long as physically possible?

Verizon for the fail

The first time David and I moved apartments, back in 2000, it took us four months to get a working phone line.

The problem was a fight between Verizon and MCI. For reasons I happily no longer remember, we were caught in a giant wrangle between the two over whose job it was to physically hook up our line -- one company owned the wires in our area, the other had our account, and resolving the standoff took me more than two dozen phone calls and countless hours of battling through Inferno-like levels of "customer service." In retrospect, I can't believe I didn't just swear off landlines on the spot and go mobile, but the whole thing eventually got so Kafkaesque that I was determined to pry a phone line out of these companies just to prove that I could.

It was good foreshadowing. Ever since, pretty much every interaction I've had with Verizon has been fraught with errors and incompetence.

I was all set to join the modern world and scrap our landline in April in our move. We'd be just fine with Skype and mobile phones, I figured, and hey, it would save us $50-$70 a month. That's what it was costing us to have a dial tone and an occasional phone call to Australia. (I was paying $10 a month for an international calling plan that gave us sensible per-minute rates, since I learned the expensive way how bat@%^! the rack rates are for overseas calls.)

But then we found out our new building was wired for Verizon FIOS. That meant that instead of kicking Verizon to the curb and consolidating our communications bills with the cable company, we could instead give Time Warner the boot and go all-in with Verizon.

Like every other cable customer, I've watched my bills creep up over the years, from about $100 six years ago (for cable and cable-modem broadband Internet) to more than $160 this year. On the flip side, Verizon was touting its "triple play" cable/Internet/phone combo packages for $89.99 a month.

I knew our bill wouldn't really be $90 a month -- fees and taxes always seem to add another 50% to telecom bills -- but it still seemed worth investigating. So I rang up, asked many pointed questions about the plan ("Are there installation fees? Equipment fees? Fees for extra computers? Required blood sacrifices every fortnight, which you charge extra fees for missing?"), and signed on. The add-on fees I agreed to were an extra $5.99 a month for equipment rental (which really should be part of the standard cost quote, but whatever) and $10 a month more for a 300/minute overseas international calling bundle. So, total bill each month should be $106 -- plus, I figured, an extra $20-$40 for taxes.

On Friday, the first bill arrived: $203.96. <insert primal screams here>

It wasn't just that the bill was too high that irked me. It was that I would now have to slog through "customer service" to untangle the mess.

And it was indeed a total mess. Despite email records confirming my order of the triple-bundle-package thingie, Verizon ran my bill for each service individually. The amounts listed didn't even reconcile -- random charges and credits skittered all around the bill, making no sense on their own and, even better, not actually adding up to the listed grand total. Instead of even attempting to sort it out, I threw up my hands and called Verizon.

Where it took half an hour to fight through the automated prompts and connect with a live human being. Happily, once I finally landed one, he looked at my bill for about 30 seconds before agreeing that it was fubared.

Twenty minutes of hold music later, I had my bill "repaired" (in theory) and knocked down to $140.56. That seems to include two months of Internet charges (prepaying May), which doesn't make sense to me if this is supposedly a level-monthly-billing plan, but I'm not inclined to battle about it.

I'm also not convinced this whole thing is actually fixed. We'll see what shows up in next month's bill.

And since my bill has been screwed up literally every single time I've signed up for new services with Verizon, I've got to assume this isn't actually incompetence. It's a business strategy -- mess up the bills and see what percentage of customers notice.

Grr.

$48,986.93

... is what it costs to transfer one piece of residential real estate, the apartment David and I are buying tomorrow (if, *fingers crossed fingers crossed* the close doesn't get delayed again).

None of that sum is the down payment, or any piece of the actual sale price. It consists entirely of title costs, attorney fees, broker commissions, taxes, and every other bit of this transaction that some third-party is managing to carve a piece off. I knew going in that this was going to be pricey, but damn. I'm impressed. And boggled.

Happily, we're not on the hook for all of that cost (merely the vast bulk of it), and some we financed into the mortgage loan. But still. This is not some Donald Trumpian multimillion-dollar real estate deal. It's a standard-issue, six-figure home loan, one in which I fought hard at every step against junk fees and avoidable "extras" we could opt out of (I now speak fluent GFE, HUD-1, RESPA and TIRSA Rate Manual).

That is an impressive amount of price padding from what you see on the sticker.

WaMu: No good VERY BAD fees

I may need a new bank. Again. GRR RAR GRUMP BOO HISS.

Back last year, when I was auditioning banks, I mentioned that my #1 absolute hard-and-fast requirement was no fees, especially for using third-party ATMs.

This is something I get irrationally cranky about. I think it's downright usurious for banks to charge their own customers back-end fees for using outside ATMs. (I'm OK with ATM operators charging front-end fees for using their machines, though I wish they were legally capped at something sensible. $1, maybe $1.50, fine. $3 and up? Sod off, Chase.) I scratched off my list every bank that charged such fees. I ended up with WaMu.

And for several months, all was fine ... until, in late April, what did I spy? A random $2 charge on my statement for "ATM BALANCE INQUIRY FEE - DOMESTIC."

Er um? This is WaMu, the company of "Start free and stay free," the company that advertises "free checks for life, free wire transfers, free ATMs, free online banking, free check safekeeping, no monthly fees." What is this balance inquiry fee nonsense?

Off went my cranky email to customer service. Back came their formulaic cut-and-pasted reply:

The fee for a balance inquiry at a non-Washington Mutual ATM is $2 per inquiry. Your previous statement period was March 11, 2008, to April 11, 2008. This $2 fee indicates one balance inquiry performed at a non-Washington Mutual ATM during that period.

ATM balance inquiry fees are charged for balance inquiries that are made at non-Washington Mutual ATMs. The fees collect during the statement period and will post as a single transaction at the end of the statement cycle. As a result, the balance inquiry fee may not post for up to a month after the balance inquiry was made. ...

In some cases, the ATM itself may initiate a balance inquiry to verify the balance in your account. In most cases, the ATM wont [sic] inform you of the balance inquiry. Because the balance inquiry doesnt generate a fee that is included in the withdrawal amount, the owner of the ATM isnt required to inform you of the balance inquiry.

(Yes, all lack of apostrophes are reproduced verbatim.)

The letter went on repetitively in this vein for several paragraphs, but the gist of it boils down to: We charge you $2 for balance inquiries (not withdrawls! withdrawls are free, because we are WaMu and market that to high heaven!) at non-WaMu ATMs. Even if you do not actually hit the buttons to inquiry after your balance, we may charge this fee anyway if the ATM decides to automatically ask what your balance is before giving you money. Because these are batch-processed and may not post till the end of the month, you have no real way of backtracking what ATM this came from and whether or not it's legit. Byebye!

At which point, of course, my blood pressure went off like Mount Vesuvius. I think I spent a full hour or two railing at David about this, who waited it out and then pointed out that I have to be one of the only "consumer advocate" types out there who can happily drop $22 for a single piece of sushi (er, we went to Bar Masa ...) and yet spend hours obsessing about a $2 fee. Which, ok, yes, point. But still.

I never, ever, ever inquire after balances at any ATM (my obsessive PocketMoney tracking means I always know to the penny what should be in my checking account), but I've been hit with this %^@$@$ $2 fee twice more. I'm toying with just how irate it makes me. On the one hand, even I realise that $6 is not worth the hell of going through changing banks. On the other hand, I deeply dislike the deceptiveness of the charge, and the general level of fee-grubbing sneakiness it indicates.

If this were my one and only problem with WaMu, I'd probably grit my teeth, write nasty blog posts, and stick it out. But I'm now on my third unrelated incident - in 10 months - that has me grumbling about my bank. Three times now (this weekend was the third) I've had debit charges come through improperly. Twice, a merchant charge ran through my account twice ($28 or so the first time, $50.50 this week); once, an ATM charged me $7 for a withdraw fee posted as a $2. David, who withdrew the same amount minutes later at the same exact ATM from his Citibank account, was charged $2.

Every time, I've clicked the "dispute charge" icon helpfully listed next to every item in my online account balance register. Every time, I've received a very clearly cut-and-pasted form letter which has been utterly unhelpful, blaming the merchant and saying to call WaMu if I need further assistance. Every time, calling has led me down a Kafkaesque chain of transfers which has ultimately resulted in me being told I need to take this up with the merchant, not WaMu.

I'm now trying to sort the latest charge, for $50.50, out with the merchant, who is being vastly more responsive and helpful than WaMu. It's entirely possible that the merchant, who I know and like and I also know has some kludgy low-tech systems in place, accidentally ran the charge twice. But in almost 10 years with NetBank and at least as long with Amex and various other credit-card companies, I've never had a double billing post to any other account. I am cursed with fraudulent charges, blessed without accidental ones. I have to assume there were some basic algorithms in place to catch likely double-billing attempts. (The same amount, from the same merchant, posted hours apart? Could it possibly be an error?) Systems WaMu lacks.

So. Much as I don't want to move accounts yet again, I'm eying WaMu very carefully and awaiting further annoyance.

Anyone out there have a bank that doesn't charge outside ATM fees (my admittedly irrational deepest financial loathing) that they actually like?

A rant about usurious long-distance pricing

I realise complaining about extortionate phone company pricing is like complaining about the sun rising each day, but -- ARUGH. I just got bit by pricing that has me very cranky at Verizon.

So, David is from Australia. At home, we have Verizon's international calling plan, where we pay $3 or whatnot a month and get a flat rate to call Australia of 14-cents-a-minute or thereabouts. Calling his mum's cell is slightly more expensive, 33 cents or so. Fine.

For Christmas, we went home to my Dad's. Dad has your standard no-frills Verizon package. I suggested David call his family to say hi, and told Dad we'd reimburse the cost. I figured it would be more than our discounted rate, but didn't think much about what it would actually be.

Just got the bill. 28 minute call. $105.56.

$3.77/minute.

Are they @^&%@^%@ kidding?

I am horked off, cranky as hell ... and realise I have no recourse. We made the call. I didn't ask about the rate. It is what it is. But RAR. Even more infuriatingly, there would have been no real way to find the rate in advance. I just spent half an hour banging on Verizon's website. If there's a way to find international calling costs, I can't excavate it. I eventually found a customer service number, and planned to call them and ask about the rate. Except they're closed weekends.

This sort of blatently abusive shit pisses me off. I am totally fine with paying a higher-per minute rate than I get under my discounted plan -- but I would like that rate to have some sane basis. It obviously does not cost Verzion $3 more per minute to provide me service. If I'd known that was the rate, I would have gone out and bought a damn prepaid card and saved $100 or so.

Grr. I guess there's nothing really I can do except remember from now on to never, ever, ever make an international call without a prepaid card, but does anyone know if there's a regulatory body I can at least send off a complaint at? BBB? FCC?

Sigh. I guess $100 is the price I pay to be reminded that phone companies are heinous bastions of usurious pricing that one must be ever-vigilant about.

When bad credit works to your advantage

Proper posting will resume sometime tomorrow, but until then, I thought I'd at least drop a quick line with a link to an article that amused me: "Some people can buy iPhone without 2-year contract"

It seems that if your credit rating is bad enough for you not to qualify for the two-year contract AT&T (aka Cingular) requires for the iPhone, they're still willing to take your money -- sans contract, as many cell-phone buyers would probably prefer. As Reuters put it:

The companies did not widely publicize that customers who do not pass its credit test have the option to pay for their service on a month-by-month basis, escaping what some consider a restrictive two-year plan.

If you don't qualify for the two-year plan, AT&T will offer you a prepaid plan. It's more expensive than service would be under a standard monthly contract, but it also doesn't have the nasty huge cancellation fees providers stick in those contracts.

I wonder if AT&T will let people with good credit go for the prepaid option, if they know about it and push for it ...

Auditioning new banks, part 1

Why is NYC banking so especially heinous?

When I went looking for a local bank back in 2001, I really couldn't find anything without a monthly fee for dipping below a set minimum. Things aren't quite that dire now -- 'free' checking is catching on, and I have a few local options -- but it's also pretty clear that banks operate here differently than they do in other places, even when they're national chains.

For example, check out Citibank's EZ checking. One of its features is "Five free uses of non-Citibank ATMs." But there's a little asterisks next to that, and the fine print notes, "Applies in all markets but CA, NV and the NYC area where it's $1.50 per withdrawal."

Why? Why is NYC different? Is it simply that the competitive landscape here lets banks get away with higher fees, or is there something strange in our local banking regulations?

(And yes, as the financial reporter, I should be the one answering that question. I'll get on it, but figured I would first throw it out there and see if anyone has any insight.)

I haven't picked a new bank account yet. I've been swamped this week and have only now started doing a serious comparison. (For those who missed it, see last week's post about how my beloved NetBank is going away.)

I've gotten a lot of suggestions in the comments. To keep things straight, and potentially help others in a similar situation, I'm going to list out the banks I've considered -- and why I've crossed them off the list.

First, a recap of what I'm looking for.

Things I consider non-negotiable

• No minimum balance required to avoid monthly fees
  
• Good online account management tools
  
• No-fee online bill pay
  
• No fees for writing paper checks
  
• NO FEES FOR USING OUTSIDE ATMs. This is something of a financial moral issue for me. I wish the charges were lower, but I don't get irate about ATM operators charging fees for non-customers using their ATMs. They're proving me a service; I'm willing to pay for it. I get furious, though, about banks charging their own customers fees for using ATMs other than theirs. That's just coercive, punitive and monopolistic.
  
  This is not a financially rational position for me to be a hardliner about. I probably spend $10-$15 in an average month on upfront ATM fees -- the $1.50-$2 per-transaction I get charged by the ATM operators for using their machines. (I pay nothing on the back-end. NetBank doesn't charge for using ATMs outside its network.) I could spend less by getting a bank with good ATM coverage and using its ATMs religiously.
  
  But. I have this fiscally irrational objection to paying routine monthly fees, or paying my bank for using another bank's ATM. In exchange for avoiding those fees, I'm willing to pay more actual cash money in upfront ATM usage fees.
  
  I don't pretend this is sane. However. It's something I am surprised to find myself caring about very strongly, so I'm sticking to my guns on it.
  

Things I would really like

• Overdraft line of credit. With NetBank, I have an overdraft credit line. If I overdraft, it transfers money from the credit line. There is no NSF charge or overdraft fee -- all I pay is interest on the funds that get transferred over. This is awesome. I try not to bounce checks, of course, but it's a very nice protection to have.
  
• Good options for a money market account with the same bank. I want to open one this year, once I, er, amass some savings. For that, I will care about interest rates.
  
  

Things I don't care about

• Interest. 0% is fine by me.
  
• ATM network coverage. It would be nifty to have ATMs around where I can get money with no fees whatsoever. However, that hasn't been the case for me for the past decade. I'm used to the pain of upfront fees and willing to continue paying them.
  

This is getting hugely long, so I'll continue it in the next post.

DAMMIT, NetBank got sold!

I'm finding this out quite late -- if they e-mailed anything to customers, I didn't see it, and since I don't read newspapers in Georgia (where NetBank is based), I didn't notice it in the news. But when I logged on today to check my paycheck deposit, I noticed a tiny note on NetBank.com's front page: "Great News! NetBank announces an agreement with EverBank. Learn more."

Nothing your bank considers "Great News!" is ever actually "Great News!" The "agreement" is "we've sold out, meet your new overlords!"

@%^@!$. I've been through this before. It sucks.

In 1996, I moved to New York for college and opened up an account with the Columbia University credit union. This was my first very-own bank account beyond the local one my parents opened for me in our hometown. In high school, I never had enough money to pay much attention to the details of my checking account; I basically dragged my paychecks over to the bank, cashed them, and rationed my cash. My Columbia account was the first I'd actually be using on a regular basis.

About two months in, I realised the university credit union wasn't going to work out for me. The union had very limited and sporadic hours. If I wanted details on what was happening in my account, I needed to find time to go over during their brief periods of availability and queue up for a printout. I suppose most people with more regular finances could have just eyed the mailed monthly statements, but I had a ) lots of deposits from casual jobs coming in, and b) a spend-it-down-to-the-last-nickel fiscal strategy, which could easily go awry if anything I didn't write down went into or out of my account. I was a broke student. Knowing exactly what was happening in my account, in real-time, was important.

So I began shopping for a new bank, one with online account access, a feature the credit union lacked. And I found Security First Network Bank, an Internet-banking pioneer.

SFNB had an office and actual branch location in Atlanta, but its primary existence was virtual. It had the features I was after: the online access (of course), and most importantly, checking accounts with no fees and no minimum-balance requirements. I signed up and transferred over my life savings (about $80, I think).

People I mentioned this to at the time seemed to find it dubious. "An Internet bank?" I was asked a lot. "Is that safe?" My take: It's FDIC-backed. I don't see why it's any less safe than any other bank.

And indeed, SFNB offered me a great banking experience. This was the first time I became an actual cheerleader for a financial-services provider. I loved my online access. I loved not being charged fees by my bank for using any ATM I wanted. I loved my free checking. And, after one particular incident, I really loved customer service.

I'd been with SFNB about two years -- sometime in my junior year of college -- when they sent out a notice about a change in their banking terms. Checking accounts would now no longer be wholly free for "casual" users: to keep free checking and avoid a monthly fee, you needed to either maintain a minimum daily average or have a paycheck direct deposit set up.

Hell. I was a student; I didn't have the money to meet minimums or a regular job offering direct deposit. My work-study and internship gigs all paid with checks. But I really didn't want to go hunting for a new bank again. So, I emailed SFNB customer service, politely complaining that they should offer a student account option with exceptions. 'Right now, I'm broke and don't have a job with direct-deposit options,' I argued. 'But in a few years, I'll graduate and be far less broke. Why not earn loyalty now by offering accounts with friendly terms for students, who will later grow up into nice lucrative customers for you?'

It worked. I got a personal email back (sadly, it's since been lost to the mists of time and email crashes) from a bank executive who said this was a good idea and they'd implement it right away. And they did! My account stayed free, and when I started working full-time, my direct-deposits went straight to my beloved SFNB account.

And then, in 2001 or so, I got a "Great News!" letter in the mail. SFNB was being sold off to Centura Bank. Then I got a big letter with Centura's banking terms. They were awful. Minimum balance requirements, heavy fees, and, stupidest of all, high fees for using non-Centura ATMs. Why stupid? Centura was a Southern bank, based somewhere in the Carolinas. It had no ATMs or branches anywhere within three states of me. What in the hell was I supposed to do, hop a plane to Raleigh every time I wanted to withdraw money? (I see I'm not the only customer who was pissed off about this. I just googled and came across an epinions rant.)

Centura pretty clearly had no interest in hanging onto SFNB customers outside its geographic zone, so I sadly went looking for a new bank. I went into branches of all the major NYC banks -- at the time, Banco Popular, Chase and Citibank -- to gather literature.

All the literature was depressing. I couldn't find a single local bank willing to offer me no-minimum-balance, no-fee checking.

So I once again turned to the Internet, and found NetBank. It met all my requirements: No minimums. Good online access tools. No fees for using third-party ATMs. I signed on.

And for six years, I've been a pretty happy customer. NetBank has lots of consumer-friendly frills, like no-fee overdraft protection. If I overdraft (which I've done once or twice by accident and several times when fraud wiped my account), I don't pay any bounce fees at all; I just pay interest on the loaned overdraft funds. (This has never added up to more than 50 cents). They've also been fairly good about dealing with my two cases of ATM hacking fraud; they refunded my money both times without any grousing about how if someone was using my PIN to withdraw cash I must have given them the number, which I've heard of other people getting grilled on by their bank.

So finding out that NetBank has been sold has me deeply, deeply cranky.

As with last time, it seems the acquiring bank has zero interest in replicating the terms that made their acquired bank so attractive to its customers. EverBank's big hook appears to be high interest rates -- but I don't care about interest on my checking account. I never keep money in there for long. I just care about free checking. And EverBank's "FreeNet" accounts? Not so much with the actually free thing. If you don't maintain a $1,500 average balance, Online Bill Pay costs $4.95 a month. There may be other fees; the website is very unclear. An "account fee schedule" section refers to a $7.95 monthly fee for accounts with an average balance below $800.

I admit I'm slightly irrational on this point. I *loathe* monthly-maintenance banking fees. $4.95 is not much. I'd spend it without thinking too hard for a snack or a magazine. I already spend more than that to bank each month, since I pay upfront ATM charges for using third-party ATMs (the fees charged by the ATMs' owners -- NetBank has no fees). But those surcharges feel slightly optional -- I'm the one choosing not to hunt down lower-fee ATMs. The idea of money being automatically sucked out of my account just because I'm not meeting balance minimums enrages me. And the principle of the thing matters enough to me to justify the pain of changing banks. (New checks, rerouting my direct deposits, changing all my stored account settings, no access to cash while the changes percolate .... arugh. I am pained just thinking about it.)

So. Hell. I need a new bank. Um, anyone like theirs? My absolute core requirements are "no minimum balance requirements to avoid monthly fees, good online account access, free online bill pay." I'd also strongly prefer a bank that doesn't charge for use of outside ATMs, and one that offers overdraft protection with no bounce fees. Beyond that, I'm flexible. And I really don't care in the slightest about interest rates. Zero percent is fine by me so long as my checking is free.

Stalking the wild NetBank ATM

I'm traveling this week -- Seattle for fun, Santa Clara for work -- which means blogging will probably be light. But I just had a wacky personal-finance moment. I'm at the Santa Clara Convention Center (for EclipseCon) and stopped at one of the convention center ATMs to snag cash. While it was processing, it flashed a commercial. For NetBank. *Blink.* I'm used to thinking of my bank as this semi-obscure thing. My first thought was that running my NetBank card somehow triggered a NetBank ad, but then I noticed the ATM was NetBank-branded. I've never seen a NetBank ATM in the wild! As mentioned before, I'm used to sucking it up and paying ATM fees (on the front-end only, not the back) whenever I withdraw cash.

Yes yes, I realise this is a financially unwise move, but I really like my bank, and for a long stretch it just didn't have any in-network ATMs in NYC. It was "pay the fees or switch banks." Plus, I'm lazy, and relatively willing to pay the fees for the convenience of going to the very nearest ATM (rather than hunting for one associated with my bank) when I need cash. I think the fees should be a hell of a lot less, but that's a whole other blogpost.

But this NetBank ATM prompted me to go take a look and see where others might be hiding. It seems my little bank got big when I wasn't paying attention -- their website claims they operate the second-largest ATM network in the U.S. They even appear to have a few near-ish my office in Manhattan now! Who knew?

It was a slightly surreal feeling getting money out of the ATM ... and not paying a surcharge. ($2, on this ATM. Bad NetBank! Stop price gouging!) Now I want to go play with the free ATM again and again. It's like my own little slot machine.