I'm not the world's most financially responsible man. I once neglected to cancel my Verizon contract for almost a full year after switching carriers, entirely out of laziness. As I've gotten older and realized that my financial blunders affect more than just myself, I've learned a few tricks. Sometimes it's only saved us a few dollars at a time, but they all add up quickly. I think the default attitude that people have about their banking institutions is that The Rules are just there, and there's really no way around them. These things aren't always quite so set in stone, especially when it comes to two things: Your credit card rate, and bank overdraft charges.

First up is your credit card interest rate. I think we all know that credit cards are The Devil incarnate, and that while they're unavoidable if you want to keep the All Powerful Credit Report happy, they can mean big trouble quickly if you don't keep a tight leash on the balance. Oftentimes, especially over the past couple of years as they realized that maybe they were too generous extending credit to anything that walks, banks will try to backpeddle and tell you that your interest rate is too low and that they're going to jack it up. Way up. It doesn't matter if you pay off the balance every single month. Credit card companies try this seeminly at random, hoping that you'll just bite the bullet and pay the higher rate. This happened to us last year, when we got a letter from Citi Bank that our interest rate was going up from 13% to 29%. For the math challenged out there, that's more than double. 

The fine print is that, since you do have an agreement with the bank, you have to agree to this new rate. The bad news is that it's an opt-out situation, but the good news is that the opt-out process -- at least for us -- was pretty painless. I just called up the customer service number, told them that we didn't agree to the interest rate hike and that we would like to opt out. At that point, they will tell you that you can continue to use the card at your old interest rate until the expiration date, at which point the bank gets to decide if they want to keep your line of credit open or not.

The other big area that used to cost us bigtime is overdraft protection fees. When you open a checking account with an attached debit card, anytime you spend more than you have in your account your bank will generally cover that extra cost, but charge you this overdraft protection fee, usually around $35. Sometimes that's ok, like when you pay the mortgage and come up a little short. $35 is way cheaper than other options like payday loans or defaulting on your mortgage. However, when it's the day before payday and you just forget you don't have the cash to cover a value meal at McDonalds, that $35 on top of the $6 you meant to spend can really hurt. Especially if you did the same thing for breakfast. 

Some banks have started offering "grace periods" on overdraft fees, which is admitadly a nice option; If you do overdraft, they will send you an email and give you 24 hours to put money back in your account to cover the deficit. What a lot of people don't seem to know, though, is that this past year a new law went into effect requiring banking institutions to allow you to opt-out of overdraft protection entirely. This means that if you go to McDonald's for that morning McGriddle and don't have the funds to cover it, your card will just be declined. Potentially slightly embarassing, but a lot less embarassing than telling your spouse that you bought a $38 McGriddle.

So check out your options. Don't just assume that fees a bank tells you you owe are set in stone and completely avoidable.