You know, sometimes I don’t give the government enough credit. If you know where to look, there are actually a lot of good resources available to help you with your money.
In my continuing coverage on how to reduce expenses in your small business, I give you another way to save money on bank fees.
Here’s a great resource I ran across yesterday. It’s on the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada’s site.
FCAC - Cost of Banking Guide.
This is an interactive guide, that steps you through a set of questions about your banking needs. Once you’ve given them an estimate of your monthly usage, it spits out a comparison of all the banks that offer compatible accounts. So, in my case, after I told them the ridiculous number of transactions I do in a month, and checked off all the boxes for added services I require (email money transfers is a big one), it gave me a chart with 16 different bank accounts. Here’s a partial screenshot of the results.
I guess I’ve heard of the President’s Choice accounts in passing, but I certainly never gave them a second thought in the past. Did you know they offer free, unlimited chequing accounts? I was happy to see that the account I use for my personal banking was listed at #2, so I’m not doing too bad compared to some. I also wasn’t surprise to see that, in last place, was RBC’s equivalent account that rang in at $30/month. I suppose paying 3x as much as ScotiaBank’s rates has benefits…I just haven’t figured them out yet.
I really encourage you all to go check out the link, and see where your current account ranks compared to other options out there.
There are other interactive banking tools on the FCAC site that may be helpful as well. It’s worth a look, considering this 5 minute trip might just have saved me $120/year.