Good point, that 1 1/2% origination fee (with some minimum and maximum limits) is certainly part of the reason why I shred those checks in disgust whenever they arrive in my mailbox. Well.. that and the fact that my account number’s on the bottom so I’m certainly not just tossing them in the trash.

I’m sure there probably *is* some kind of loan origination fee that I’ll be nailed with to get my cash back out. You can bet I would dispute it in the branch manager’s office.

There are so many “usual and customary” fees in this industry that there is no way that a normal person can possibly know about that I find it annoying when they keep popping up in my account unexpectedly. I don’t like *anything* unexpected in my financial world.

That said I should point out that one of the reasons that I do business with SunTrust is that they have, in the past, been VERY reasonable about service / banking fees. My portfolio account has no monthly fees, no limits on withdrawals/deposits, absolutely no fees for anything that I would do on a normal basis. They can make all their money off of my deposit capital by lending it to others and investing it. They certainly don’t give me anything for it in interest. But that trade-off is acceptable to me. I keep my “emergency money” in a higher interest account at another institution anyway. They also make tons of money off my mortgage and, when I occasionally purchase big ticket items like a car or do renovations on my house.

If you have not done this yet, a question to ask….are there fees for doing this?

It’s a long, story, but I ended up with a balance in a credit card account for which the credit card was expired, and it was going to take MBNA 4 months to transfer the balance to my active card number. But I had cheques that could be written against this like of credit which they said would give me the money back quickly.

I got dinged for a large ‘cash advance fee’ for using one of those cheques just to get my own money back out.