Quick: What's your daily ATM withdrawal limit? If you said $400, you might be wrong. At Bank of America, for example, the limit is $300. The price of making that mistake is $1.50. That's what I found out last month when I tried to grab as much cash as I could before I hopped a plane to cover Hurricane Rita in Texas. Given other reporters’ experiences after Katrina, I decided to bring as much cash as possible. The ATM nearest the plane gate wasn't Bank of America, but I decided to pay the $4 or so in fees for using another bank’s machine.

My first attempt to get $400 was denied and my transaction canceled. That's all I knew. I took my card bank.

Moments later, I tried to withdrew $300, and was warned I'd face fees both from the machine owner and my bank for using the wrong ATM. Duly censured, I accepted the fee. And that, I thought, was that.

Bob quotes a BofA flack as claiming that BofA had to pay a fee to the ATM owner for an attempted transaction so it was rightfully and justificably passing along the cost. The BofA flack claims these fees can run up to $5-7. I'd like to know what bank charges a $5-7 inter-bank fee. These interbank fees are known as interchange fees, are set by networks, not by banks, and typically run less than a buck.

Like Bob and like the experts he quotes, this is a new fee on me. But banks gouging consumers for every transaction and, now, attempted transaction, isn't new, as we chronicle at Stopatmfees.com. Here's our most recent blog (also mentioning BofA) on interchange issues.