E*Trade Sells Your Stock To Pay Inactivity Fee”<\/a> article back in October of 2008 before opening an E*Trade brokerage account. Luckily E*Trade did not sell my stock but they did threaten to — I owed them $37.81 from a $40 inactivity fee. I have since changed brokers. <\/p>\nI could have avoided the fee by making a “less than $9.99” trade. E*Trade charged me $40 for inactivity. How could they possibly justify this, even if they tried? <\/p>\n
Charging me four times more than what I would paid if I had been “active”? I can understand them charging me “less than $9.99” since they may plan for a certain revenue but multiplying that by four? <\/p>\n
Why not buy me $30 worth of stock instead? Could the answer be as simple as “greed”? <\/p>\n
I decided not to argue with E*Trade over it. I read your article which talks about Brice sending eight EECBs just to close his account. That along with E*Trade’s “Commissions & Fees” chart discouraged me. <\/p>\n
E*Trade’s customer service had provided me with a hyperlink to that chart. I decided to try navigating there myself. I couldn’t figure it out. After over an hour I called E*Trade and was told I needed to type “fees” into the search box to find it. I asked if that was the only way and was told yes. No wonder why it was so difficult to find!<\/p>\n
To make things more confusing, if you happen to find that chart the Account Service Fee is not displayed like other fees. Other fees are lined up neatly with a margin and the dollar amounts are shown in bold. The Account Service Fee is not in bold and the “$40” is written in the middle of a sentence at the beginning of a paragraph. You can see it here: https:\/\/us.etrade.com\/e\/t\/estation\/pricing?id=1206010000#AAF<\/p>\n
I think consumers should be aware of banks doing the following, which are done to intentionally obfuscate things in my opinion: <\/p>\n
1. Changing the well-known name “inactivity fee” to “account service fee.” <\/p>\n
2. Hiding fee schedules. Try to hide the least ethical fees as much as possible on the schedule itself. <\/p>\n
3. E*Trade in specific makes their “Forms & Applications” page daunting to look at — watch out for things like this. This is the page I am refering to: https:\/\/us.etrade.com\/e\/t\/prospectestation\/pricing?id=1201010000 There are 17 subsections of forms, each with a “more” link at the bottom. Clicking more takes you to a whole new page. There is no way to expand all subsections on a single page. If E*Trade’s entire site was presented this poorly I believe it would impact their bottom line in a negative way.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Online stock traders, which service do you prefer and why?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Dave says he feels he was stuck with a hidden fee by E*Trade, which threatened to sell his stock to recover a $40 inactivity fee. So much for the buy and hold strategy. He writes: I wish I would have read your “E*Trade Sells Your Stock To Pay Inactivity Fee” article back in October of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4514,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-259289","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259289","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4514"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=259289"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259289\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=259289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=259289"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=259289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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