In a post entitled Making 6% on your checking, John Chow writes:

What I want to talk about is making a return on your checking account. How is this possible when most checking accounts pay little to no interest? By taking advantage of the min balance required to waive the monthly fee. In my case, if I keep a $2,000 min balance in my account my monthly fee of $9.95 (now $8.95) is waived. That works out to a saving of $119.40 a year, just for maintaining the min balance. That’s a 5.97% return on my money, which is not bad for a 100% safe investment.

Actually, there is a way to avoid bank charges like John suggests AND make some money.

Some accounts, like HSBC or Citi, require minimum deposits, that’s for sure. But these kinds of accounts combine checking with other features usually, so the minimum is usually the minimum total deposit for a banking relationship, it may include a lot of other features, too.

So for my Citi account, I met the minimum easily enough, but then I opened Time Deposits, thereby avoiding charges and earning interest, at the same time. And interest rates on 6 month or 12 month time deposits are ATTRACTIVE.

Save AND EARN! Kind of 👿

(John! I posted this as a comment on your thread, but found the comments closed!)