The hidden fees eating up your bank balance

Despite reforms, many charges are not clearly disclosed

The average checking account has 30 fees, a new study finds, and one-fifth of U.S. banks still don’t provide a list of these charges before a customer submits an online application. 

Some banks charge as many as 50 individual fees for checking accounts, according to the survey by financial website WalletHub.com. “If you thought prepaid cards charged a lot of fees, you obviously haven’t scrutinized a checking account agreement in too much detail,” says Odysseas Papadimitriou, the site’s founder and CEO.

  Capital One and Fifth Third Bank, a regional bank based in Cincinnati, were the only two banks to earn perfect scores for transparency in the survey. Fewer than half (48%) of major banks had well-marked, direct links from their checking account product pages to a full summary of fees. Worst rated were the 20% of banks that fail to provide a list of checking account fees on their product pages. Among them are HSBC Bank, Huntington National Bank, USAA Federal Savings Bank, Sovereign Bank, and M&T Bank, the survey found.

A spokeswoman for Sovereign Bank says the group improved the clarity of its fee disclosures last week to make checking accounts easier to understand by offering “simpler and more transparent fee disclosure information” in line with recommendations by The Pew Charitable Trusts’ “Safe Checking in the Electronic Age” project.

For their part, banks say they’re working on increasing fee transparency. “Avoiding fees is often as simple as maintaining a minimum balance or using direct deposit,” says Mike Townsend, a spokesman for the American Bankers Association. A spokesman for Huntington Bank says it’s working on integrating its disclosures into the account products pages, and an HSBC spokesman says customers wishing to open an online checking account must first confirm they’ve read account fee disclosures.

However, the manner in which major banks inform customers about the costs associated with their checking accounts remains confusing, Papadimitriou says. They list different fees in different places online, call them by different names, and don’t always highlight the most important fees, the study found. Regulatory bodies have spearheaded some improvement, making disclosures shorter and somewhat easier to understand, Papadimitriou says, “but there’s obviously still work to be done.”

Consumer advocates say they’ve repeatedly urged regulators to require prominent and smart disclosure of fees online, and to offer downloadable bank fee data and easy-to-read bank-account-shopping guides. In fact, less than half of 250 bank branches surveyed last year fully disclosed fees to prospective customers on the first request, while 12% provided no fee information at all, according to the nonprofit Public Interest Research Group’s most recent survey on the issue, Big Banks, Bigger Fees 2012.

To be fair, many of these fees are only triggered by certain behaviors, like going below a required balance threshold or bouncing a check, banking experts say. And although most checking accounts come with fees, they’ve traditionally been considered a loss-leader for banks, says Ben Woolsey, spokesman for credit-card comparison site CreditCards.com. “They’re regarded as a gateway account — to serve as platform to obtain higher-margin business from the customer, like mortgages and car loans,” he says.

Still, banks are under pressure to generate more revenue from checking accounts, Woolsey says. Bank customers who sign up for overdraft protection services, for instance, tend to have significantly higher annual fees, according to a separate study by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Why the rich never retire

 The ultimate American dream used to be to get rich young and "retire by 40." Now the goal for the rich is to retire past 70—if they retire at all.

A new survey shows that America's highest earners don't plan on retiring until they are at least 70 years old. Lower-income groups—and even those considered "affluent"—plan to retire much younger, according to the study from Spectrem Group, a wealth research firm.

When asked "At what age do you expect to retire?" nearly one-third of those with annual earnings of $750,000 or more answered "over 70." Fifteen percent of them say they never plan to retire.

On the other hand, only 6 percent of those making under $100,000 a year plan to retire after 70, and the same percentage say they never plan to retire. Most plan to retire by 65.

The Spectrem survey is backed up by other, previous studies. A 2010 study from Barclay's Wealth found that 54 percent of millionaires say they want to continue working in retirement. Globally, 60 percent of those with a net worth of $15 million or more plan to stay involved with work "no matter what their age."

The numbers contrast with the popular notion that Americans are retiring later mainly because they can't afford to stop working. The Spectrem survey shows that the highest earners—and those who can best afford to retire—are actually working the longest.

 Many of the respondents earnings $750,000 or more are business owners and entrepreneurs. They are far more likely to take risk in their finances and their life, and they are more likely than those with lower incomes to credit hard work for their success.

George Walper, president of Spectrem, said there are two broad reasons for the retirement-denial of the rich. First, he said, many of them own businesses that they cannot easily leave. If they retire, the business fails—so they have little choice but to keep working until they have a succession plan or buyer.

But he said the main reason is that entrepreneurs love their work and can't imagine life without it.

"Most of these people enjoy working and are very involved in their businesses," Walper said. "To them it isn't really work." For those in lower-income brackets, he said, "a job is a job—it's a more traditional experience."

Corporate America is now filled with founders over 70 who are still active in their companies or in business—from David H. Murdock, the 90-year-old CEO of Dole Food who is trying to take the company private) to the 90-year old Sumner Redstone at Viacom and the 71-year-old casino tycoon Steve Wynn.

Walper added that even among top earners who say they're "retired," many continue to serve on boards, advise their companies or work the phones several hours a day. They also may be doing more of their business from a more pleasant spot—say, their pool in Palm Beach—rather than a corner office.

"They may say they're retired because they're only working five days a week now instead of seven. And they're doing it from a different location," Walper said. "To them, that's retirement."

—By CNBC's Robert Frank.