Banking Corner with Brandon
By: Setepu Brandon Mokaba
Today we are going to talk about Bank Charges. We tend to jump the gun and say “Eish! Eish! Bank charges are too much and X bank is expensive with charges”, but the truth is 90% it’s our fault.
We don’t read or ask for advice before utilizing a bank product or before processing that transaction. Let’s learn to thoroughly understand the advantages and disadvantages of a product before making funny remarks.
Let’s make sure the product is suitable for our banking needs, get to know the features and the benefits of the product.
Since at the end of the day it is about you and what you get from the product or rather what you save for yourself, don’t forget the exclusions as well so that you may not expect the unexpected from the product.
Let us avoid traditional banking, by this I mean why would you travel 60 kilometres to a branch to withdraw R500 from your bank account inside the branch of course?
Whereby you stood on the queue for more than three hours, whining and moaning obviously for that particular transaction, then travel another 5 kilometres to another bank to deposit that same R500 to your child at school or for rent maybe.
People should know that just by looking into the teller’s eye while waiting for your transaction to be processed, there is a fee you will be levied already.
This fee is called a Branch Counter Fee, for example; if a branch counter fee for a deposit is R40, and for every R100 you get charged R1.50 cents, then if you are depositing R200 for an example you will be charged R43.
Broken down in this manner R40 Branch counter + (1.50 x2), so let’s practice to do transactions on our own using convenient channels.
