Obviously, you made a mistake. This should read "BofA charges BofA Customers $5 a Month," unless you are a National Review poster, and thus totally beholden to the "job creators."

Dodd Frank didn't mandate that BofA charge people $5 for debit cards, it just reduced the amount they could charge retailers. It was BofA's decision to try to make up this revenue by charging its customers. If enough of BofA's customers refuse to pay this $5 fee for having access to their own money, BofA will reverse this decision. Will we then say that Dodd Frank was responsible for them getting rid of the fee? No. The free market can survive DF if consumers remember that they are in control of their money.

My advice is that anyone that doesn't want to pay this fee should switch banks. Free checking with no debit fees is still something you can find at many community banks and credit unions.

"If it's OK to dictate prices to banks, why don't we tell grocery stores what they may charge for milk?"

Ummm, we do. Many (most?) states set a minimum retail price for milk. Not that that makes Dodd-Frank any less idiotic, mind you.

I never said implied it was BofA's fault but that it was their choice. Dodd-Frank (which has many other problems) does not require BofA to recoup this lost revenue by charging a debit card fee. That choice is entirely up to BofA.

It used to be that banks made a nice steady profit in collecting deposits then investing that money (usually in the form of loaning it out to small businesses and people wanting to buy homes). But that business model wasn't very sexy on Wall Street during the early 90's and the stocks of old school banks lagged behind those of banks that found ways to generate "fee" revenue rather then making money through interest rate spread.

The quickest and easiest way to get BofA to reverse course is not trying to amend or repeal Dodd-Frank, but for enough customers to take their deposits out of BofA and move them to a bank that still believes it can make a profit serving its customers rather then exploiting them. Do you think that it costs BofA more to have a customer use a debit card for a transaction then it does for that customer to use a check? Yet it wants to charge people money for something that saves its money.

Here's the thing, though. Before the bank started charging you, SOMEBODY was paying for you to get that "free" service. The bank was quietly charging fees to people with much less control over whether to pay that fee and no ability to comparison shop for different fees. Did you check other banks to see what they would charge you for your business account?

Also, I'm not sure you need to start invoicing people in your personal name. Invoice them in the LLC name, and then when they write a check to the LLC, simply endorse it over from the LLC to you personally, and deposit it in your personal account. I'm not saying this resolves all liability issues, and the lack of a separate account may make it easier to "pierce the corporate veil," but I don't see a reason for you to stop invoicing through the LLC.

I'm not aware of any such law. An LLC, like any other person or entity, can endorse as check however it sees fit, generally speaking. I'd ask your credit union to give you a copy of the law or rule which they claim prohibits this. It's been a long time since my commercial paper class, but I'm pretty sure that there aren't any LLC-specific rules regarding what they can do with checks.

Again, and I'm not giving you legal advice, depositing the checks in your personal account may still make it easier to pierce the corporate veil, but it's less likely to do so than if you simply stop using the LLC altogether and invoice and collect everything in your own personal name entirely.

Yeah, the blame here is with the bank, not the statute. Besides, it costs almost $5 per use for a non-bank ATM transaction -- one could take the $5 monthly hit and use the debit card for cash back any number of times to avoid the hit on the ATMs. Smart consumers will get around these crazy fees every time.

I have no love for the law, but I don't understand the attack on the "big box" stores. In fact, the per-transaction costs is a hidden fee on consumers. It is ultimately paid by them, but they are not aware of it, nor do they have an opportunity to bargain with the bank over what it is.

Moreover, while the transaction fees may average 1.19% of the charges, it actually varies depending on the card used. Cards which pay rewards back to the consumer charge a higher rate per transaction... but since the vendor is contractually prohibited from assessing the transaction fee as a separate charge to the consumer, the vendor must simply increase the total sales price of his goods to an amount sufficient to cover the fee. Thus, those of us who pay cash are subsidizing those who use credit and debit cards. Worse, those of us who pay cash or use a no-frills debit card (which gives no rewards and has a lower per-transaction fee) are subsidizing the free miles and other rewards of consumers who previously were using "rewards" cards which have a higher per-transaction fee.

The transaction fee is part and parcel of using the credit card. The cost should be more directly assessed on the person choosing to use the credit card, the consumer, not buried and hidden as the vendor's cost of doing business. Screw all the rewards card people.

"But why not charge the customer a few cents per transaction instead of a stiff five bucks per month?"

My guess is consumer psychology.
Since they are still getting some money from the big boxes, just not as much as before, they want you to keep using the card. A per transaction card fee would cause many people to hesitate each time they use the card. A flat fee does not have this affect.

In general, we rarely pay exactly what a particular service costs. SOmetimes we pay less, because the sellers know that once they get us into the store, we will buy things that aren't on sale and their total profits will go up. Other times we pay more because the company knows that we consumers want that particular service a lot and are willing to pay for it.

The company that I am working for recently completed a project that most of the managers admitted will lose money because they don't believe many people will buy it. They built it because it completes our product line. They felt that the advantage of being able to advertise ourselves as offering a complete product line was worth more than the cost of completing this one product. The device was connected remote locations by radio rather than wire. They are hoping that even if our customers keep buying the wired versions, that in the future, when our customers need to rearrange their facilities because of growth or whatever, we will be able to sell them the wireless versions as a cheaper alternative to all that re-wiring.

My point is that while from a theoretical standpoint, charging each customer exactly what they are costing sounds wonderful, in the real world, things rarely work that way.