By Harold Phillips | June 2026
I didn't leave TD dramatically. There was no single moment, no letter from the branch manager, no particularly egregious fee that pushed me over. I just sat down one afternoon in early 2022 with a spreadsheet and a bank statement and started adding things up. By the time I was done, I had a number on the screen that made me feel genuinely stupid for not having done this exercise four years earlier.
That number, roughly speaking, was somewhere north of $600. For nothing. Five years of monthly service charges, out-of-network ATM fees, the occasional overdraft, and a brief stretch where I was paying for e-Transfer sends because I hadn't bothered to find out which account tier let you do them free. Six hundred dollars to TD — in exchange for a chequing account I could have had elsewhere for zero.
That's this article.
The Fees, Itemized
The main one was the monthly account fee. I was on the TD Everyday Chequing account for most of my time there, which at various points over those five years cost me between $10.95 and $16.95 a month. There's a waiver if you keep a minimum balance ($2,000 for the lower tier, more for the premium ones), which I sometimes had and sometimes didn't. During the two months I was unemployed in 2019, I definitely didn't. During stretches when I was putting money toward the RRSP I'd neglected for a decade, the balance dipped below the threshold more than once.
The math on that is annoying. You pay a fee to avoid a fee. Keep $2,000 sitting in your chequing account doing essentially nothing, or pay $15 a month for the right to have less than $2,000 in your chequing account. It's a false choice, and it's one that mostly catches people who actually need the money. Not people with comfortable six-figure household incomes who can effortlessly park two grand and forget about it.
I was paying the fee more months than I wasn't. Call it an average of $10 a month across the five years. That's $600 right there from the monthly fee alone.
Then there were the ATM charges. TD has a big network and I tried to use it, but there were enough times I was somewhere without a green machine visible (a late night in a neighbourhood I didn't know, a road trip stop off the 400) where I used whatever was around. Non-TD ATMs charged me $3 to $5 per use, and TD charged me another $2 on top of that. I estimate I did this maybe twice a month on average, though it was probably higher before I got smarter about it. At $5 a pop, twenty-four times a year: $120 over five years, give or take.
E-Transfer fees I didn't pay for long. I think I sent maybe ten paid ones before I figured out the tier situation, but it was still irritating to realize I'd been charged $1.50 per transfer to move money to a friend or pay a landlord, which is a completely normal thing Canadians do constantly. The fact that e-Transfers are now free on most plans everywhere is the minimum standard, not a feature.
The overdraft was a one-time thing and I'm slightly embarrassed about it. A payment processed a day earlier than I expected, my account went negative by $40 for about eighteen hours, and TD charged me $5. Not the end of the world, but it's the kind of fee that exists purely to extract money from people who made a small timing mistake. The banks call it "overdraft protection." I'd call it a fee for being briefly wrong about when your rent goes through.
The Minimum Balance Gymnastics
Honestly, this is the part I find most indefensible when I think back on it.
There's a whole mental game that comes with having a "free if you maintain a balance" account. You have to monitor your balance continuously. You leave money sitting idle that could theoretically be somewhere more useful, even in a basic HISA, because you're scared of triggering the monthly fee. It's not a huge cognitive load, but it's a consistent low-grade annoyance that has a real opportunity cost if you think about it carefully.
I did the rough math once: if I'd kept that $2,000 balance in a Wealthsimple account earning even 3% in those years instead of in my TD chequing account earning 0.00%, the interest would have been meaningful. Not retirement-changing, but $120-ish over five years on that balance alone. The bank was getting the float on my money in exchange for waiving a fee on an account that shouldn't have had a fee in the first place.
That's the part of big-bank fee structures I find genuinely hard to defend. The business model asks you to pay for the privilege of banking with them, or to give them free access to your idle cash as the cost of avoiding the fee. Either way, they win.
The Switch
I moved to Simplii and Wealthsimple in early 2022, and I've written more fully about both over on the blog. My Simplii review has the details on the day-to-day banking setup, and my Wealthsimple review covers the investing and cash side of that picture.
The short version: Simplii gives me a free chequing account with unlimited transactions, free Interac e-Transfers, and no minimum balance requirement. Wealthsimple holds my TFSA and RRSP and also has a spending account I use for some purchases. Between the two of them I have everything TD gave me plus actual interest on my savings, and the annual cost is zero dollars in account fees.
The switch was not complicated. I moved my direct deposit, updated my pre-authorized payments one by one over about two weeks, and closed the TD account. My partner, who has been watching my "optimization phases" since at least 2019, said it was the least annoying one I'd done, which I'm choosing to take as a compliment.
The Other Side of This
Here's the thing: I don't think TD is useless for everyone. I don't, actually.
Big banks have physical branches, and that matters for certain people. If you're new to Canada and trying to establish credit and banking relationships, walking into a branch and talking to a human being is sometimes worth paying for. If you're a small business owner who handles cash regularly, you need somewhere to deposit it, and the online-only banks don't do that. If you're applying for a mortgage and you've had a twenty-year relationship with your bank, that relationship can have real value in ways that are harder to put in a spreadsheet.
There are also people for whom having everything under one roof (chequing, savings, RRSP, mortgage, credit card) is genuinely worth the monthly fee because the convenience and simplicity matters to them. I'm not going to tell those people they're wrong.
But that's a pretty specific group of people. For someone like me in 2017 (renting an apartment, TTC commuter, no complex banking needs, doing occasional e-Transfers to split bills), there was nothing TD offered that justified what I was paying. I was paying premium prices for the default option I'd chosen because I walked into a branch near campus when I was nineteen.
That's not a reasonable basis for a financial relationship — and it's one I think a lot of Canadians are in.
What I Think About Now When I Think About This
The five-year total I came up with, somewhere around $600, isn't a life-altering number. I want to be honest about that. Six hundred dollars over five years is $10 a month, and there are bigger financial leaks in most people's lives than a $10 monthly bank fee.
But it's the principle that bothers me more than the dollar amount. The big banks in this country earn billions of dollars a year in profit. They charge fees that are, in a lot of cases, not justified by any particular service you're receiving. They're just the cost of the default, the thing you pay because you haven't gotten around to looking at alternatives. And the alternatives, in 2026, are genuinely good. Simplii has been around for years. Wealthsimple has a full suite of products now. A comparison like Simplii vs Tangerine shows you the actual differences if you want to read the fine print.
The banks count on inertia. Most people don't switch because switching feels complicated, and because no one wants to spend an afternoon updating direct deposit and pre-authorized payments. I understand that. I was that person for five years.
But the switching cost is a few hours, one time. The fee savings are every month, indefinitely.
Look, I don't think you're an idiot if you still bank at TD or RBC or any of the Big Five. These are genuinely easy defaults to fall into, especially if you've been with them since student banking. I'm not here to tell you that you're a fool for not having done this analysis already.
I'm here to tell you what I found when I actually did it, and what I did about it.
- This is an opinion piece based on my personal experience. Banking fees, account structures, and available alternatives change over time, so do your own research before switching providers.