It turns out that when I did use the ATM on the military bases in Korea, I was getting hit with ATM fees from BofA. These fees were not from the bank that maintained the ATM, it was BofA. So after wasting my time playing phone tag with BofA while overseas, I concluded that this was not beneficial after all. Prior to deploying to Iraq, I canceled my account with Bank of America.

I’ll give it to you that Bank of America (BAC) is large; and as a member you would have access to your money almost anywhere. But I don’t really want to stand in line with all of America if I need to talk to a teller and I certainly don’t want my bank to feel that since they are the largest bank around, they can do whatever they want.

Most of all, after watching all of these huge financial institutions mismanage themselves, beg for taxpayer dollars and then not share their records of how their spending ‘our’ money – I think I’ll stay away from publicly traded banks. I’ll especially steer clear of any bank with their own controversies page on Wikipedia. =)

BofA has some of the highest fees around. I’m not just talking about their outrageous ATM fees (because they wouldn’t apply to you – as a customer) but also their fees for non-sufficient funds and overdraft transactions.

While I do agree that if I’m not going to pay attention to my balance – then I deserve to pay a stupidity tax for letting my account go below zero. However, these banks use all of our deposits on a daily basis to make themselves richer – so don’t you think they could cut us a little slack when we slip up or run into some bad luck. I see no need for fees to constantly be on the rise – $5 here and $10 there – they just do it because they can. It’s a blatant fact that banks are making some insane profits with all of their unnecessarily high priced fees and the biggest banks (like BofA) are the worst.