Multiple Bank Accounts: How to Stop Losing Money to Fees You Didn't Notice
The more accounts you spread across banks, the easier it is for one to start charging fees you don't notice — the average maintenance fee in Spain is now around €160/year, with some banks charging up to €240. This post walks through a 15-minute audit to catch it, account by account.
Table of contents
Having accounts at two or three banks is pretty normal — one you've had forever, one you opened for a sign-up bonus, maybe a third tied to your broker. Having several accounts isn't the problem. The problem is that the more accounts you have, the easier it is for one of them to start charging you without you noticing — because almost nobody checks five different statements every month.
The number worth keeping in mind
According to ASUFIN's latest Barometer of Bank Fees in Spain, the average annual maintenance fee on a current account is now around €160, and it's been climbing year over year. At some banks it runs as high as €240 a year, and in at least one case that cost doubled in a single year. Multiply that across two or three accounts, over a few years of not checking, and it stops being a rounding error.
Why it hits harder with multiple accounts
Almost no bank charges a maintenance fee "just because" — it usually depends on meeting certain conditions: direct-depositing your salary, a minimum number of card transactions, a minimum balance. The problem is those conditions sometimes change, or you stop meeting them without realising it — you changed jobs, you stopped using that particular card. With one account, that's easy to catch. With three, it's easy for one to slip through — and if you're an expat still holding an account back home too, that's one more statement nobody's checking regularly.
The fees worth actually checking
It's not just the maintenance fee. These are the ones people miss most:
- Account maintenance — the most common, and the one that's risen the most this past year.
- Card maintenance — sometimes separate from the account fee, and sometimes charged even if you barely use the card.
- Transfers, especially instant versus standard ones — the average cost between the two varies noticeably.
- "Compensated" fee-free accounts: some banks advertise no maintenance fee but make it up with lower interest on your balance or costs baked into other products. Fee-free doesn't always mean free — sometimes the cost just moved somewhere else.
How to audit it in 15 minutes
- Pull statements from every account for the last quarter, not just last month — some fees are charged periodically, not monthly.
- Search for the word "fee" in each one. If it shows up and you don't know why, that's your first question for the bank.
- Compare what each bank charges against what you actually use it for. An account you barely touch, with a fee attached, is usually the first candidate to close or renegotiate.
- Check whether you still meet the fee-waiver conditions on each account — direct deposit, minimum transactions.
- Decide with the numbers in front of you, not from memory. It's far easier to spot this when your accounts sit side by side than going bank by bank.
This is, in fact, step 5 of the September financial reset checklist. And if connecting every account to an app gives you pause, we explain why the access is read-only and what the regulation says.
What changes once you see it all together
The reason these fees go unnoticed is almost never that they're huge — it's that they're scattered. FinBoard shows you, account by account, exactly what each one is costing you — not to judge which bank you're with, but so the decision to stay or switch is yours to make, with the numbers in front of you.
Start free, no card required at finboard.me.
