I was just looking over my Wells Fargo statement online, and discovered that they have hidden (not indicated clearly at time of service) fees for everyday banking activities. I was charged $1 to check my balance on one of their ATMs, and I was charged $2 for accessing my account over the phone. Oddly, these sorts of fees will simply lead most people to go into a branch and occupy a banker, costing Wells Fargo more than if they just let the customer use the ATM.

The bank also automatically transferred $25 from my checking to my savings, untold to me when setting up the account (and I read everything!). This seems like a nefarious scheme concocted to make people bounce checks… I only keep what I need for a check to clear in my low-interest checking, leaving my savings, well, in savings. Here they go moving $25 out of checking into savings as some sort of favor to me, and had I written a check it would have bounced, leading to fees and hassles. As a further kick in the stomach, WF deducts any fees from your checking instead of your savings, also in an apparent effort to get you to bounce a check.

Now that I’ve been bitten by them three times to me in as many months, I will no longer do banking with Wells Fargo. That’s their loss, particularly when I leave before they recouped their investment in me, and warn potential customers in this review. I’m moving to E*Trade bank after next month’s rent check is taken care of. E*Trade will reimburse my ATM fees anywhere, and has the highest checking (3.25 APY) and savings (5.05 APY) interest rates in town. I guess I’ll be moving my ING account, which hasn’t kept up interest-rate-wise into E*Trade as well. At this point I have no idea how brick-and-mortar banks will survive much longer now that online banks are better across the board.

A popular topic of conversation among folks at work is how they save for when they don’t want to work anymore, that is, how they are planning for retirement. I figured I’d share my own setup.

Off the top of my paycheck, 10% of the money goes into Apple’s Employee Stock Purchase Program (ESPP). Every six months, I get to buy Apple’s well-performing stock at a nice discount, 15% off of the stock price at the beginning or end of the period, whichever is lower. There are different tax issues depending on when I sell the stock, and it is favorable tax-wise to hold onto it for at least a year. The plan for stock sale proceeds is to use some of them to treat myself to the occasional vacation and to roll the rest into other investments.

The next 12.5% of my paycheck goes into my 401k. At my age, I can afford to be fairly aggressive with my investing, and have divided my investments between a number of mutual funds.

40% of money is divided into two blended fund investments, which do all the work for me based on when I will be retiring or on a general notion of balanced investing. 10% goes into real-estate, which I figure I am buying into low given the subprime collapse. The other half is in investments I picked out to do a similar thing to what the BGI Lifepath 2045 (retirement year) plan does. Of that half, 54% goes into large cap stocks, 10% into mid cap, 6% into small cap, 22% into foreign, and 8% into bonds.

My total IRA allocation is:

20% FBALX - Fidelity Balanced Fund (Moderate Allocation)
20% BGI LifePath 2045 N Fund (Professionally-Managed Retirement-Year-Based Fund)

10% TAREX - Third Avenue Real Estate Value (Speciality Real-Estate)

14% FCNTX - Fidelity Contrafund (Large-Cap Growth)
5% VIIIX - Vanguard Institutional Index Fund Institutional Plus (Large-Cap Blend)
4% VITSX - Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund Institutional Class (Large-Cap Blend)
2% FGRIX - Fidelity Growth & Income Portfolio (Large-Cap Blend)
2% LSGRX - Loomis Sayles Growth Y (Large-Cap Growth)

5% VEXRX - Vanguard Explorer Fund Admiral Class (Mid-Cap Growth)

2% VSCIX - Vanguard Small-Cap Index Fund Institutional Class (Small-Cap Blend)
1% NSCRX - Nuveen NWQ Small Cap Value Fund R (Small-Cap Value)

7% DODFX - Dodge & Cox International Stock (Foreign Large-Cap Value)
4% VIDMX - Vanguard Institutional Developed Markets Index Fund (Foreign Large-Cap Blend)

2% GSHIX - Goldman Sachs High Yield Institutional (High-Yield Bond)
2% VBTIX - Vanguard Total Bond Market Index Fund Institutional Class (Intermediate-Term Bond)

Here’s the last year of data (where we bear in mind that you should only really mess with your 401K mutuals once a year):

Daily closing prices for my portfolio can be viewed here.