Like Mookie I'm with Chase - only cuz through a series of buyouts and mergers they ended up owning the bank where I'd had my accounts for 15-20 years. But I've never had any real problems with them.
At the moment I'd be charged a monthly fee for using their website to pay my bills, but I dodge that by paying anything that can be done electronically at the payees' sites - since they're the ones who want to get paid, they seem perfectly happy to handle the transactions from their end without charging me anything. But I do pay a monthly "service fee" on my checking account, against which I write two - count 'em, TWO - checks a month. Everything else is an electronic transaction of some kind, and I really only use the debit card when I need cash back at the till or to withdraw it directly from a Chase ATM. If they want to charge me an *extra* fee just for that, then I'm gonna have to start wondering what the current service fee is for - the untold toil and sweat that goes into handling my two paper checks a month?
The real question for me is whether or not the smaller institutions and credit unions around here have caught up in offering online banking. Some family have had their accounts at one of the bigger local credit unions for years, and it's only been in the past few years that they actually had access to an ATM that wasn't INSIDE the bank lobby and therefore unavailable when the bank was closed. How convenient!
So I guess what I'm saying is, if there's not a better alternative that will still give me all the conveniences I have now with Chase, I'd probably just suck it up and pay the darn fee.
