Credit card surcharges

I usually just bake it into my fees as a cost of doing business. But if I was doing substantially more business, I might be tempted to utilize it. For now, I view it as a convenience and I am fine with eating the fee. When I personally buy things now and I see a surcharge, I immediately get a little irate, and I feel like my clients would do the same. I am paying you $10k as a retainer, and you want to charge me a processing fee on top of that? Just wouldn’t want it to disrupt my relationship with the client.

That being said, I am a family law attorney. My colleagues in estate planning who surcharge don’t get as much push back in this arena from my conversations with them.

We went back and forth on this.  No surcharge, add a surcharge, and then finally dropped the surcharge  altogether given anecdotal client feedback. Thereafter we tweaked our rates a bit to help offset the growing use of credit cards, even for Trust deposits.