# Reading Thoughts #1  
## Banks, Fees, and My Father 
Inspired by *Unbank America* by Dr. Lisa Servon

### Read the Terms

One lesson from my childhood has stayed with me far beyond finance and investing.

Growing up in China, my family was comfortably middle class. We were never particularly wealthy, but my parents were careful with money. My father began his career as a banker at a state-owned bank and later became a division chief. When I opened my first bank account at the age of thirteen, he gave me one piece of advice that I still remember today:

> **"Always read the terms first, no matter how complicated they are."**

At the time, I thought he was being overly cautious. *It's just a bank account,* I remember thinking. *What could possibly be hidden in the fine print? If there's a fee, surely the staff will tell me.*

To convince me otherwise, my father turned it into a game. If I could answer five questions about the account agreement after reading it, he would give me five dollars. That was enough motivation for a thirteen-year-old.

As we went through the terms together, we discovered something I had never expected: my bank charged fees for withdrawals from ATMs outside its local branch network. It wasn't a large amount, but it was enough to make an impression. From then on, I developed a simple habit—always check whether an ATM belongs to my bank before using it.

Looking back, the lesson was never really about saving a few dollars. My parents were generous with me, and the fee itself hardly mattered. What mattered was the principle. If a charge was clearly disclosed and I knowingly accepted it, that was my responsibility. But if I was charged because I failed to understand the agreement, then I wanted to know exactly why.

That habit has stayed with me ever since. Ironically, I'm more likely to spend $200 on a hotel that I genuinely value than to quietly accept a $5 fee that I believe is unfair. For me, the amount has never been the point. The principle has.

### Growing Up Around Banks

Growing up in China, I never thought much about banks. Opening an account was straightforward, maintenance fees were rare, and mobile payments had already become the default way to pay for almost everything. I even remember that when I turned eighteen, I opened accounts at five different banks simply because I liked collecting their debit cards. Some had beautiful landscape illustrations, others featured pandas or traditional Chinese paintings. To me, banks were almost interchangeable. Choosing one over another was more about the card design than the fee schedule.

Banks also felt familiar because my father worked in one. As a child, I would occasionally visit his office after school. The lobby was quiet, the staff knew many customers by name, and banking felt less like buying a financial product than visiting a public institution. I never associated banks with anxiety or distrust. They were simply places that helped people save money, transfer money, or apply for a loan when they needed one.

### My First American Bank Account
That perception changed after I moved to the United States.

The first surprise came when I opened my own checking account in the United States. Just as my father had taught me years earlier, I read the terms before signing anything.

Suddenly, I found myself reading about maintenance fees, overdraft fees, out-of-network ATM fees, minimum balance requirements, and a long list of conditions attached to what I had always thought of as a basic financial service. Even after carefully reading the agreement, I still discovered that the “terms” were more complicated than I had imagined.

One experience has stayed with me.

I opened an account with a federal credit union because its account agreement explicitly stated that it did not charge out-of-network ATM withdrawal fees. A few weeks later, I withdrew about $50 from an ATM inside a Target store. When I checked my account statement, I noticed that $51.50 had been deducted.

My first reaction was simple: the terms said there shouldn’t be a fee.

So I called customer service.

The representative patiently explained that my credit union had not charged me anything—the $1.50 fee came from the ATM operator, which was a separate company. From their perspective, the account agreement was technically correct.

Technically, they were right.

But from a customer’s perspective, the distinction felt almost meaningless. I wasn’t trying to understand which institution had collected the fee; I simply wanted to withdraw cash from my own account without paying extra.

After several rounds of discussion, the representative eventually refunded the fee as a one-time courtesy for being a valued customer.

I appreciated the gesture, but the experience stayed with me for a different reason. It reminded me that understanding the terms is not always enough. Sometimes the boundaries between institutions matter just as much as the terms of any single institution.

Finally, I understood why my father had always insisted that I read the terms—and why he believed that making small mistakes was sometimes the best way to learn.

But the experience left me with a much bigger question.

Why does something as ordinary as a bank account require so many rules?

Who benefits from this complexity?

At the time, I didn’t have an answer. I only knew that banking in the United States felt different from what I had grown up with.

Whenever I called my father to complain about another fee or another confusing policy, he would give me almost exactly the same answer:

“Did you read the terms?”

Sometimes the answer was yes. Sometimes it was no. But even when I had read every page, I still felt that I was missing something. I understood the contract in front of me, yet I didn’t understand the logic behind it.

My father never blamed the bank. In fact, he spent most of his career working in one. He also never told me that banks were trying to trick their customers. Instead, he would patiently explain why a particular rule existed, what risk it was trying to manage, or how a fee was disclosed. 

One thing he often reminded me was simple:

“Banks make money from fees.”

He never said it with approval or criticism. To him, it was simply a fact, a reminder that banks are businesses, not charities. Every fee has a purpose. Every product has a business model. If you understand how the institution makes money, many of its rules become much easier to understand.

Looking back, I think he was teaching me something much more valuable than how to avoid unnecessary fees. He was teaching me that every institution has its own logic. If you want to understand an institution, don’t just look at the outcome. Ask why the rules were written that way in the first place.

Years later, while reading Unbank America, I suddenly found myself thinking about those conversations with my father. 

### Paying to Get Paid

One of the first things that surprised me was check-cashing stores.

As someone who grew up in China, I had never really thought about the idea of paying someone to cash my own paycheck. My family get their salary through debit cards. It sounded almost paradoxical. If a paycheck is money that already belongs to you, why should accessing it require another fee?

My first reaction was exactly what my father would probably have asked:

Why doesn’t the person simply deposit the check into a bank account without fees?

I later told my father about this chapter, and it reminded him of a story from his years working at a bank in China. He recalled that some customers, particularly those with less financial experience, would regularly withdraw cash from ATMs operated by other banks without realizing that the transactions carried additional fees. The information was disclosed, but many people either never noticed it or assumed all ATMs worked the same way.

His point wasn’t that people were careless. It was that financial products often assume a level of knowledge that many customers don’t have. What seems obvious to someone who works in banking can be completely invisible to someone who only interacts with the system occasionally.

That conversation made me realize that financial decisions are rarely made in a vacuum. They depend on experience, information, and how understandable the system is in the first place.

Unlike the ATM example, however, the people in Unbank America were often fully aware of the fee. They paid it not because they failed to understand the rules, but because the alternatives available to them were even worse.

Some people have never opened a bank account. 
Others had one, only to lose it after overdraft fees, unpaid balances, or repeated financial hardship.
Some no longer trust banks because previous experiences taught them that a “simple” checking account could quickly become expensive. 

What had always seemed like a basic financial service to me was, for many people, neither simple nor accessible.

In those situations, paying a fee to receive cash immediately becomes a rational decision, even if it is an expensive one.

That chapter made me realize something important.

People were not choosing check-cashing stores because they preferred paying fees.

They were choosing them because the alternatives available to them were even worse.


### Borrowing Until Friday

The next chapter pushed me even further.

If check-cashing stores challenged my intuition, payday loans completely overturned it.

Who would ever borrow money at an annual interest rate of several hundred percent?

It sounded irrational.

Then I remembered another question my father used to ask whenever we talked about a financial product.

“What problem is this product trying to solve?”

That question completely changed how I read the chapter.

Imagine your car breaks down on Monday. Your paycheck arrives on Friday. Rent is due tomorrow. Your child needs medicine tonight.

A traditional bank is not going to issue a $300 loan for only a week or two. The administrative cost is high, the profit is small, and the borrower may appear risky.

From the bank’s perspective, declining the loan is rational.

But the customer’s problem does not disappear.

The payday lender stepped in.

For the first time, I stopped asking why people would choose payday loans.

Instead, why the mainstream financial system had left this need unanswered in the first place.

That does not make payday lending fair.

But it does change where responsibility begins.

### My Father’s Question


When I shared these stories with my father, expecting him to agree that the American banking system was unnecessarily complicated, he responded with a question instead.

> **"Why didn't they plan ahead?"**

This is the sentence my grandma told my father. Always planning ahead to buy a little room out.

He wasn't dismissing the struggles described in the book, nor was he defending every fee or financial product. He was asking something he had asked me throughout my childhood whenever we talked about money.

**Could this have been avoided with better planning?**

Growing up, that was always his philosophy. My family was never wealthy, but we rarely lived paycheck to paycheck. My parents believed that unexpected expenses were part of life, not exceptions to it. Cars break down. Appliances stop working. Medical bills appear. You may not know *when* they will happen, but you can be fairly certain that *something* eventually will.

For a moment, I found myself agreeing with him. If people had even a small financial cushion, wouldn’t many payday loans become unnecessary?

But as I continued reading Unbank America, I realized the answer was more complicated.

My family was fortunate. We were never wealthy, but we always had enough room to plan ahead. The emergency fund my parents carefully built over the years was rarely used for emergencies at all. Eventually, it became part of the savings that supported my education abroad.

Not every family has that luxury.

Some households simply do not have enough margin to save. Others face emergencies so frequently that every attempt to build a financial cushion is quickly exhausted. Planning ahead is invaluable—but planning itself requires resources, stability, and, sometimes, luck.

...

*Acknowledgment: This essay is based entirely on my own experiences, ideas, and reflections. ChatGPT was used only to help improve the organization and grammar. I reviewed, edited, and approved every part of the final manuscript.*