The way banks treat their customers these day, it's hard to imagine them as trying to be your friend.
But you only have to go back a few years to remember advertising that illustrated how friendly banks were.
What has changed? And what is your bank's relationship with you today? I don't think your bank wants to be a bully.
If I apply basic psychology to analyze the relationship I have with my bank, I start by asking myself if the parties to this relationship follow what I learned about Parent-Adult-Child relationships.
For a "friend" relationship to exist, I learned, the friends need to be of equal stature.
In that way, two parents can be friends, or two children can be friends, but the relationship between a parent and their child is different than a basic friendship between two equals.
Why? Because a parent has the responsibility for forming the child's behavior.
There are other reasons, too.
But this one is good enough to establish where I'm going with my thinking.
It's difficult for an authority figure to be a "friend.
" This is not to say that there can't be some friendly encounters.
Fathers do go to ball games with their sons.
But the use of authority is always available to direct what might happen while the two are together on their "friendly" outing.
During the past twenty years, we have seen banks attempt to build a "friendly" relationship with their customers.
Gradually, they trusted customers to judge their own ability to repay loans.
And just as gradually, they learned how customers weren't always the best judge of their own ability to repay debt.
Eventually, we saw average debt per household rise to over $8,000.
That's just for credit cards! The "average" hides what really happened.
Not all people accumulated this debt.
If you look at only those households that did have credit card debt, the average was much higher, over $18,000.
As this picture became clearer, banks were able to choose which of their customers they wanted to be "Friends" with.
These friends usually paid off their credit card balances, and seldom wrote a check that bounced.
For customers who ran up credit card balances and bounced checks, the relationship became more like the Parent/Child relationship.
Banks tried to change the customers' behavior with penalty interest rates.
You might think this was purely a business reaction to cover the risk involved, but I don't think that is the case.
If they were covering risk, banks would have denied the use of credit for these customers altogether.
Instead, they were thinking of either (1) punishing the mis-behaving customer, or (2) being greedy at the expense of the mis-behaving customer.
If they were being greedy, that wouldn't go over well with the good customers.
So, I conclude they were acting like parents trying to change the behavior of the child.
While the bank where you do your banking was realizing what was happening with credit card debt, there was another problem taking shape in the world of investment banking.
Mortgages, and the mortgage business began to crumble.
Mortgages are more a part of the investment community than the banking you usually think of with checking and savings accounts, and credit cards.
But we were using our mortgages and home equity to pay off our credit cards.
Those two worlds, mortgages and consumer credit, were on a collision course.
The collapse of the mortgage market had a strong impact on retail credit for credit cards.
Your bank found some of its customers simply walking away from their obligation to pay their debt.
We saw houses selling for less than was owed on them (short sales), personal bankruptcies, and some cases where banks made a deal to settle for less money than the balance owed on credit card accounts.
These are true losses that banks need to recover.
Many reports about how much money banks have charged in fees and penalties tend to ignore these losses.
So your bank is probably feeling a little grumpy these days.
The period of being your friend didn't work out too well.
Now your bank is a bit jumpy about finding ways to cover the next surprise loss that will come its way.
Today's bank wants customers who are responsible with their money.
And to make sure everybody knows that, overdraft fees and credit card rates are being raised beyond what many people think is reasonable.
If you still think your bank is a bully, there is one way to make sure they won't push you around.
You do that by avoiding debt and boosting your FICO score.
If you are the customer who keeps a balance in your checking account and never bounces a check, your bank will probably be very friendly to you.