Yup. BofA charges $35 or $45 for wire transfers. That's a hell of a lot of money when you have 200'000'000 captive customers.

For domestic transfers, under what circumstances do people use wire instead of ACH transfers? I've only used wire transfers for international purposes.

Walmart person to person. It's $10 for amounts over $50. American Express Bluebird cards have a person to person, and there is PayPal. PayPal debit MasterCard makes the last one an attractive option.

It's funny. Every time I mention Walmart and how actual people who don't have all the advantages in life handle finacial transactions, I'm down voted. I think there are some blind spots in some of HN's users.

Hmm, I found the comment useful and just up voted it.

Only time I've had to wire money was for the downpayment on a house. Apparently there's a limit to how much you can send over ACH (at least with some banks).

The difference is reversibility.

ACH never settles, it just hasn't returned yet. There's a 60 day window for ordinary not authed returns, and even past that in cases of fraud. ACH is also push or pull, you can push money or the person you're paying can pull. (Or paychecks. A lot of paychecks are run over ACH). There are limits on ACH, depending on what you're doing its anywhere from 2.5k to 25k to $10^8.

Wires are nearly irreversible. Once you send the money, it's Gone. So the banks have a lot more documentation that they do for retail customers. Wires are push only.