Since August 2022, I have completely changed the way I do banking to bring my monthly banking fees to zero.
I used to use Scotiabank and Desjardins, and both had monthly fees on even their lowest tier accounts.
Some of them waived the fee if you kept e.g. 3,000$ in it, but that’s 3,000$ that’s not “working”, e.g. not generating some kind of interest.
Now, I use the following banks:
- Tangerine
- Shakepay Card
Tangerine offers a checking account with 0$ monthly fee! That was awesome. Note that behind the curtains Scotiabank bought Tangerine, but they haven’t touched the pricing structure… yet!
Shakepay Card is a prepaid VISA card that pays you 1% cashback in Bitcoin.
You can use the card by tapping with your phone, and you also get a card number, expiry and CVV that you can use for online purchases too.
Because the Shakepay Card is a prepaid card, I have to protect myself against fraud since it’s almost like cash and transactions are most of the time final.
For that, Shakepay has a button to “Lock” and “Unlock” the card at will.
So I keep the card locked at all times, and unlock it briefly when I need to use it, and lock it again as soon as the transaction has passed.
So far, I’ve been quite satisfied with that new way of banking, I have been paying much less banking fees, I’ve become aware of a lot of services charging me monthly that I didn’t use that I cancelled, and banking has been a much more tangible experience.