HN Explorer

Ask HN: Why isn't there a bank that stores your money and charges fees for it?

3 points by ergocoder ↗ HN
I would definitely put some money there. Wonder why there is no such service.

Edit: I mean a bank that doesn't do anything with your money e.g. putting out loan or buying bond with it. Therefore, your money would be theoretically safe.

7 comments

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pavlov
I’m not sure what you mean. Many banks already charge fees for a regular bank account?

I lived in the US for a couple of years and had an account with Wells Fargo. They charged $15 / month (!) but waived the fee if the customer keeps a balance of a few thousand dollars, or gets a regular paycheck. So I never paid the fee.

Now living in Finland, my bank theoretically charges something like 3 EUR / month but I still don’t pay it because it’s offset by customer bonuses I get from having my mortgage with this bank.

So really these monthly fees are a way of weeding out inactive customers.

senttoschool
I think they're actually illegal in the US. There was someone who posted a link to a bank who tried that and got shut down by regulators. The reason is because the government believes money should be put to work - otherwise, it's a negative asset because you need to hire physical security, cyber security, engineers, support people, etc. to service the money that is doing nothing.

By the way, the negative asset logic is one reason is why Warren Buffet hates Bitcoin.

dzink
There are safety deposit boxes but a recent article showed they are not safe at all. There are also safes you can buy and install somewhere. However the fact that you have inflation eating your money, and that the holder of the money incurs huge risks holding them for you (security, insurance, real estate, tech infrastructure) means that they would either eat any small deposit quickly or you have a huge stash and the costs are negligible. So my take is, unless you have huge amounts of money the demand would be low.
paulpauper
You can buy put options on the bank. I ran some numbers and it costs about 2%/year to buy out of money puts to hedge a 50% decline for Bank of America. This should be enough
theGeatZhopa
What about the Islamic banks?

They do not take rate fees because that being "against the believes", but also, they do not pay interest rates.

I've read something about that a while ago and thought "ok, but how do they earn money". It was not clear for me, how they do that. And, yeah, it wasn't of any importance for me.