H
House
Guest
BuggedOut said:Only a troll would be proud of being called a troll.
Maybe you weren't self-aware previously.
So disagreeing with someone is trolling. Got it.
How to Throw Money Away
- Thread starter JulieW
- Start date
So disagreeing with someone is trolling. Got it.
JulieW said:
An indicator that 40% of people have wised up?
Like others, the rare times I have paid it is when I have been caught short on cash.
I understand and accept my time is more valuable than walking/ driving an extra however far to avoid a $2 fee.
wrcmad said:
A little bit from column A and a little bit from column B.
What can you buy with $2 today that wont ruin your teeth ?
A real simple solution is to take enough fiat out of your account when your at the bank, or your banks atm and not have to use a competitors one. Our nearest bank is 80km away, but we don't even use that unless we need to withdraw a large amount, as when we go buy grocery's it is really easy to just get cash out when paying by eftpos. A couple hundred here a couple hundred there and before you know it, you have Fiat a plenty for SFA cost.
Another all a do about nothing really thread.
A real simple solution is to take enough fiat out of your account when your at the bank, or your banks atm and not have to use a competitors one. Our nearest bank is 80km away, but we don't even use that unless we need to withdraw a large amount, as when we go buy grocery's it is really easy to just get cash out when paying by eftpos. A couple hundred here a couple hundred there and before you know it, you have Fiat a plenty for SFA cost.
Another all a do about nothing really thread.
long john silver
Member
Hi Julie,
Sometimes its not worth fighting, convenience is a human need above most others in good times.
I once thought as a naive silver stacker , it just shows how little people value paper money.
Now i realize that that its a service people are more than willing to pay for!!
May i suggest an investment in:
http://www.starpaymentsystems.com.au/investor-relations
If you cant beat them join them!!!!!!
Regards,
John
Sometimes its not worth fighting, convenience is a human need above most others in good times.
I once thought as a naive silver stacker , it just shows how little people value paper money.
Now i realize that that its a service people are more than willing to pay for!!
May i suggest an investment in:
http://www.starpaymentsystems.com.au/investor-relations
If you cant beat them join them!!!!!!
Regards,
John
clear said:
Yeah, private ATM operators like CashPoint and Cashcard. You also find them in small retail outlets like 7-11 and gas stations.
The business owners get to 'rent' out a small part of their premise by collecting a percentage per transaction.
If they install them in the right locations with enough transactions, then (in theory) they get to sit back and collect the fees like they own an invisible toll bridge.
One or two were even publicly traded on the ASX as penny stocks, on the flip side a few have collapsed.
H
House
Guest
Hilarious report just on 9 News about ATM fees and how they're "hitting the everyday person where it hurts... savings". Cuts to two people telling a reporter how much they think they've spent this year on ATM fees. A shocking $50 and $20 :lol:
Goes on about how these poor folk are being "slugged" with "sneaky" fees that build up into "substantial amounts".
ING stopped the 2% PayWave thing a few mo this ago. Great promotion to get people to sign up, very few new customers will bother changing back.
They also don't have any ATM's or branches so it would be significantly cheaper to refund the max $100/year the average customer is likely to spend on ATM fees.
Goes on about how these poor folk are being "slugged" with "sneaky" fees that build up into "substantial amounts".
Revils said:
ING stopped the 2% PayWave thing a few mo this ago. Great promotion to get people to sign up, very few new customers will bother changing back.
They also don't have any ATM's or branches so it would be significantly cheaper to refund the max $100/year the average customer is likely to spend on ATM fees.
I happen to know a bit about this.
Firstly, banks hate spending money on anything, including ATMs. They're cheaper than having a branch on every corner, but they still cost money so your bank will have the minimum number of ATMs out there that they think they can get away with before people start getting annoyed and switch to another bank. It costs money to buy the hardware, it costs money to lease a space to put the machine, it costs money to connect them to the payments network, it costs money to fix them when they break and it costs money to have Guys with Guns turn up every week to replenish the cash.
Guys with Guns are particularly expensive.
All in all, your bank would much rather you do all your every day banking online and take out a big mortgage, because that's where they really make their money. The every day stuff is the hook they use to extract a million-off dollars out of you over 30 years of home loan repayments. They don't offer to refund foreign ATM fees because they're nice, they do it because they'll get it all back and more on your first mortgage application fee.
When the ATM market was deregulated in 2008 one of the requirements was that all machines had to display a message on the screen saying "You will be charged $x.xx if you proceed with this transaction. Do you want to continue? [Yes]-[No]". It's quite obvious if you're using a machine that doesn't belong to your bank that there is a fee involved. If you don't have an existing relationship (like an account) with whoever owns and operates the machine, you're going to end up paying the price that's displayed on the screen if you want to use the service. If you don't want to pay the fee, you don't have to but then you don't get to use the service either.
ATMs at service stations, pubs, convenience stores, etc. are marginal sites. Banks generally don't want to put machines there, so it's either the third party ATMs or nothing. Those machines are (relatively) cheap to buy and often get refilled by whoever managers the site using the cash that came in through the till the day before. For the site manager, it's the difference between going to the bank once a week versus three times a week since they can recycle the cash and have the funds credited to their account via the transaction processor's settlement system. The site usually gets a commission from whoever owns the machine, keeps it connected to the payments network and collects the transaction fee and that offsets some of the fees they pay on EFTPOS/credit card transactions. The merchant takes a hit when you pay by card, you take a hit when you use a third party ATM and it all comes out in the wash.
How much the third-party transaction fee is depends purely on supply and demand. Maybe it's $2 because people have other options for payments, or maybe it's $2.50 because there are no bank-owned machines around. Maybe the owner of the machine has set it to $2.50 because it's simply not worth the cost of owning and maintaining it for anything less than that if there's not a lot of people around who want to use it. In that case, it's either an "expensive" ATM or no ATM. Either way, you're free to use ATMs that don't belong to your bank, but you generally have to pay for what you use.
Personally, I bank with a credit union and try not to use third-party machines. I also generally don't pay $4.50 for a bottle of Coke at train station vending machines or $12 for a small box of popcorn at the cinema either, but that's me and if someone wants to try making a buck selling stuff to people who want it then good luck to them.
I also know people who won't bend down to pick a $2 coin up off the street and people who will happily bitch for hours about the 19% they're paying on their credit card but won't transfer the balance over to a new 0% card and try clearing a big chunk off the principal during the interest free period, so value is obviously subjective.
Firstly, banks hate spending money on anything, including ATMs. They're cheaper than having a branch on every corner, but they still cost money so your bank will have the minimum number of ATMs out there that they think they can get away with before people start getting annoyed and switch to another bank. It costs money to buy the hardware, it costs money to lease a space to put the machine, it costs money to connect them to the payments network, it costs money to fix them when they break and it costs money to have Guys with Guns turn up every week to replenish the cash.
Guys with Guns are particularly expensive.
All in all, your bank would much rather you do all your every day banking online and take out a big mortgage, because that's where they really make their money. The every day stuff is the hook they use to extract a million-off dollars out of you over 30 years of home loan repayments. They don't offer to refund foreign ATM fees because they're nice, they do it because they'll get it all back and more on your first mortgage application fee.
When the ATM market was deregulated in 2008 one of the requirements was that all machines had to display a message on the screen saying "You will be charged $x.xx if you proceed with this transaction. Do you want to continue? [Yes]-[No]". It's quite obvious if you're using a machine that doesn't belong to your bank that there is a fee involved. If you don't have an existing relationship (like an account) with whoever owns and operates the machine, you're going to end up paying the price that's displayed on the screen if you want to use the service. If you don't want to pay the fee, you don't have to but then you don't get to use the service either.
ATMs at service stations, pubs, convenience stores, etc. are marginal sites. Banks generally don't want to put machines there, so it's either the third party ATMs or nothing. Those machines are (relatively) cheap to buy and often get refilled by whoever managers the site using the cash that came in through the till the day before. For the site manager, it's the difference between going to the bank once a week versus three times a week since they can recycle the cash and have the funds credited to their account via the transaction processor's settlement system. The site usually gets a commission from whoever owns the machine, keeps it connected to the payments network and collects the transaction fee and that offsets some of the fees they pay on EFTPOS/credit card transactions. The merchant takes a hit when you pay by card, you take a hit when you use a third party ATM and it all comes out in the wash.
How much the third-party transaction fee is depends purely on supply and demand. Maybe it's $2 because people have other options for payments, or maybe it's $2.50 because there are no bank-owned machines around. Maybe the owner of the machine has set it to $2.50 because it's simply not worth the cost of owning and maintaining it for anything less than that if there's not a lot of people around who want to use it. In that case, it's either an "expensive" ATM or no ATM. Either way, you're free to use ATMs that don't belong to your bank, but you generally have to pay for what you use.
Personally, I bank with a credit union and try not to use third-party machines. I also generally don't pay $4.50 for a bottle of Coke at train station vending machines or $12 for a small box of popcorn at the cinema either, but that's me and if someone wants to try making a buck selling stuff to people who want it then good luck to them.
I also know people who won't bend down to pick a $2 coin up off the street and people who will happily bitch for hours about the 19% they're paying on their credit card but won't transfer the balance over to a new 0% card and try clearing a big chunk off the principal during the interest free period, so value is obviously subjective.
BuggedOut said:
My old boss installed the first non-bank ATM in the country. It cost the racing club that bought it $110,000 in 1992 dollars.
Using the machines was never free, it just depended who paid for it.
Pre-2009 there was charging structure in place called an interchange fee. Non-bank ATM providers (there weren't many) either built their own transaction processing systems or piggy-backed off a bank system and paid for access. The ATM owner or their financial institution partner would negotiate a payment from each other bank for every transaction that was processed for that bank's cardholders (the interchange fee). Obviously the banks pushed that down as low as they could so providing ATMs wasn't an especially profitable business and therefore there weren't as many machines around as there are now.
The interchange fee was also nowhere near $2.00-$2.50. The banks which could afford to put out more machines to keep their customers happy (the bigger banks) generally paid lower interchange fees to the ATM owner, but they still slugged cardholders with a $2 "foreign ATM fee" to encourage customers to use the network they spent a lot of money building. Banks that couldn't afford to build large networks paid higher interchange fees because it was cheaper to do that than spend lots of money on the equipment and maintenance. Some banks gave some account types "free" foreign ATM withdrawals, but they still paid the interchange fee and just absorbed the cost of it themselves. Just like now, it was an expense incurred to keep the customer happy.
Then the EFTPOS and credit card networks got better and more reliable (like, the click-clack machines disappeared and wireless modems came in) and the RBA and Australian Payments Clearing Association decided it was a better to just deregulate the market and not have such an opaque system that nobody could figure out the inner workings of. The big banks absolutely used their market power behind closed doors to keep the smaller banks in check, but it's harder to do that now that there's more competition e.g. a secret 50c interchange fee suddenly becomes a lot harder to subsidize when goes up to the $2.50 that they were actually charging their customers.
So that's what happened: if you have a deal with someone (a bank) to provide you with a service (an ATM withdrawal), you can use the service they provide on whatever terms apply. If you don't have a particular deal to use a service, you pay the market rate.
Of course, the incentive is still there to use your own bank's ATM in that it's usually free, but if you were going to pay the foreign ATM fee anyway then at least you're not getting secretly gouged by your own bank and the money actually goes to whoever is providing the service. There's also a lot more choice in that there's an extra 7000-odd machines that weren't there ten years ago, even though people are using them less because card payments are better than they used to be.