Discover has announced the elimination of fees from all of its deposit products – including checking, savings, money market and CD accounts. Discover will not have any fees for overdrafts, insufficient funds, excessive withdrawals, and stop-payment requests. They already offer accounts with no fees for monthly maintenance, checkbook orders or replacement debit cards.
I love these things banks do to simplify the accounts. There’s money savings there too, but to me the bigger thing is the simplicity of knowing I don’t have to think about researching whether this, that, or the other will result in a fee. There are some smaller fin-tech banks who offer these kind of completely-fee-free accounts, Discover will be the first major bank to do this too. Apple did a similar thing when they launched their credit card by eliminating fees entirely. I expect we’ll see more of this as competition does it job.
Discover offers a free online checking account with 1% back on debit purchases, and they also have a reasonably competitive savings rate of 2.10-2.15%, making it a pretty good option for a checking/savings combo.
Update: Note, there still are, presumably, fees for wire transfers. Also, not all ATMs are free, only those in network. Also, if you break a CD early, presumably that fee still applies. There may be some other fees which can come up as well.
