Intriguing
October 20, 2009 | Oregon, industry | Comments (0)Did Oregon banks raise fees after payday lenders left the state? From the story:
Here are two alarming facts the consumer protection group discovered in a survey of 10 banks and eight credit unions offering “low cost” checking accounts in Portland, Eugene and Ashland:
An overdraft of $20 paid back in two weeks amounts to a loan with an Annual Percentage Rate of 3889%, more than 7 times higher than what was common in the payday lending industry before Oregon established effective regulations in that market.
and
A typical customer who incurs a modest number of the different fees outlined above could pay an average of $166.24 in fees every year simply to maintain a regular checking account. This ranged from an average of $132.95/year for the credit unions surveyed to an average of $184.24/year for the banks surveyed.
“If you think you’ve got a free or low cost checking account, you might be surprised to learn that you are subject to a long list of poorly disclosed, sometimes outright deceptive fees and policies that can really add up,” says OSPIRG Consumer Advocate Matt Wallace, who wrote the report.
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