Bank fees are penalties or maintenance requirements that may apply to checking, savings, or money market accounts.

Banks may charge fees for specific types of transactions, if a check bounces, or just a monthly checking account fee. There are many other types of fees and reasons for them. They may be penalties, such as an overdraft fee, or they may be customary for the kind of transaction or account being used.

Some fees are activated when certain criteria are met, such as if the balance of an account is below a certain threshold, which might be called a small account fee, and this charge might be assessed monthly until the balance gets above the threshold.

Fees that are charged per-transaction may include all one-time electronic and wire transfers from one account to another, but this is not the case with some banks. Banks may also charge inactive account fees if an account has not had any account activity for a set amount of time.

This can be confusing and might seem greedy since it doesn’t appear to be costing the bank anything to hold the money, but dormant accounts tend to require special monitoring on behalf of state agencies that do require some bank resources.

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