Photo courtesy of Endless Studio
This is a guest post from Karen Galarpe, who also writes for our entrepreneurship blog Open for Business:
I went out one morning to pay my Social Security System contribution. Since I am self-employed, I pay my contributions myself to the banks. BDO, the bank I have an account with, does not accept SSS and Philhealth payments, so I have to go to other banks.
I usually go to RCBC Savings Bank on Visayas Ave. (near front of Montessori) because there’s hardly any line there. I think the last time I paid there was July. As of then, it was still free to pay your SSS contributions over the counter. For the next months, I went to East West Bank and UCPB (depends on where I am that day). On this particular day, I went again to that RCBC Savings branch. And the male teller said they’re now charging P10 just so I can pay my SSS contribution over the counter!
Ten pesos is cheap, true, but I don’t like paying for something I can get for free somewhere else. So I made a U-turn to UCPB at the corner of Visayas Ave. and Congressional, and I didn’t have to pay a single centavo.
Why should a bank charge for a service that’s offered free elsewhere? Why should we pay for something we can get for free elsewhere with the same, if not better, quality of customer service?
This is the same reason why I only withdraw from my bank’s ATMs.
From MoneySmarts: the thing with bank fees is that unlike Karen, most of us would rather just pay and swallow the fees hook, link and sinker. It pays to keep an eye open on the fees that you are asked to pay and compare these with other banks.
I know comparing is not a walk in the park, either, because not a lot of banks disclose fees on their websites and the only way to know that someone is offering a service for free is to physically ask at the counter. And that takes a lot of time. But time is money and money is time. Convenience has always been expensive.
25 Responses to “Bank fees you don’t have to pay”
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Pages: « 5 4 3 [2] 1 » Show All
October 16th, 2008 at 12:59 pm
@paetechie: Thanks for the tip. It’s great to know people can pay SSS contributions online — but only if they have an account with a Bancnet-affiliated bank. So that means I still have to go and pay over the counter.
October 16th, 2008 at 12:00 pm
i always withdraw from my bank (metrobank), as here in cebu thankfully almost all the major streets have a metrobank branch.
imagine my consternation when we went to makati (dyan sa may greenbelt area), only to find that the 2 or so metrobank atms in the vicinity were ALL OFFLINE!!! one is in the pldt bldg skywalk and the other is somewhere in glorietta. it was a weekend but shouldn’t banks stock their atms on weekends and make sure no technical glitches occur as much as possible?
i hate losing Php 12/transaction! Banks don’t give that much interest to you in a month unless you have a huge deposit with them!
October 16th, 2008 at 11:40 am
oo nga bakit ang daming charges sa bangko..
kagaya ng magpapa encash ka ng check - kunyari PNB ang check pero kailangan pumunta ka mismo dun sa PNB branch para wala charge…
ganun ba talaga?
October 16th, 2008 at 11:33 am
@jen
dumaan kasi ang transaction mo thru their intl line hence nailagay sa category ng 300 petot fee assessment.
October 16th, 2008 at 11:29 am
it’s a coincidence that i posted an entry about pay SSS contributions online in my blog just recently. No need to go to your bank or SSS branches for individual SSS members.
Banks now promote online banking to decongest their branches (it’s expensive to maintain branches)
Jen, you may have transacted at a time when BDO and Metrobank transactions were processed via Cirrus/Mastercard when BDO( ExpressNet) and Metrobank (BancNet) were not yet linked locally. Now they are connected, no problems now.
btw, I don’t work for a bank