Last week I was charged $144 in bank fees for four ATM purchases, each under $10 (I will be closing that poorly rated SunTrust account). Among the things that make those fees so painful is that I had hundreds of dollars sitting in another account, and tens of thousands of dollars in unused credit on cards. (I pay credit card balances in full each month).

Reporter Bob Sullivan has a new book out, Stop Getting Ripped Off: Why Consumers Get Screwed And How You Can Always Get A Fair Deal. He was Monday’s guest on Fresh Air and he says I’m not alone. His solution:

I think it’s a terrible idea to spend money with debit cards, for a lot of reasons. The biggest one is that once upon a time, debit cards were considered safer than credit cards because you were spending your own money. But the banks that issued these cards realized they were losing money that way, and so they added all these fees – the most significant being this overdraft fee, which you’ve heard so much about.

It’s very, very easy to overdraw your checking account using a debit card. And once you do that, it’s very easy to ring up six, seven, eight of these charges. So that hamburger could cost you $200 or $300. And especially if you’ve already spent a lot and now you’re kind of near the edge of your checking account once you pay your bills this month – you don’t want to be close. You don’t even want to give yourself the near occasion of ending up with an overdraft fee, because they almost always cascade. That’s a big headache.

But in a larger sense, what I’m really against is people using their main checking account, the place where their paychecks are deposited once or twice a month, and they write the big checks in their lives – the mortgage, the car payment. I’m really against people swiping their debit card and getting money from an ATM, and cluttering up those accounts with 30 or 40 transactions every month.

You’re just bound to trip up when you do that. This is called velocity in the banking world, and the more velocity you have, the more opportunities there are for mistakes.

He suggests you separate accounts into a “staging account” where you deposit paychecks and write the big checks. And an “allowance account” for everyday, petty-cash purchases. You call the bank and make sure there is no overdraft authorization on that account. The idea is that you always have a grasp of what money you have and where it is. But he’s generally against using ATM cards.

Ironically, I was, too. I understood that you have more protections for credit card purchases than for ATM — you can dispute a charge and refuse to pay on a credit card; with an ATM card, the money’s gone before you can dispute it. Banks generally honor disputes so I started using the ATM card. And made the mistake above more than once.

Listen to the full interview — or buy the book — for Sullivan’s complete critique of banks. I’m sure many of our readers will disagree with that critique but I am right there with him on every point. In any event, I will not be caught using an ATM card again!