Mortgage joy. Credit card heaven. Bundled loans, low interest loans, loans tailored to meet your needs; overdraft, redraw and much more.

I haven't always loved banks. In the 1970s one of the big four charged me a dollar (back then!) just to ring up another city branch to check an account balance.

I didn't go back for 30 years. I recently found the lost passbook from the 1970s with a balance of about $70 and went into the same branch to wind it up and collect the "windfall".

"Let's put it this way," the kind teller said.

"The accumulated fees outweigh the balance by about 100 to 1, so why don't we just call it quits?"

The Reserve Bank keeps regular transaction data on 17 banks, comprising 90 per cent of the sector.

The statistics ain't pretty. Since the year 2000 the banks have creamed almost $50 billion from our savings in bank fees, averaging about $4 billion a year. The annual sting rose to $5 billion a year during the global financial crisis.

Indeed, while the Australian government was bailing out the banks during the GFC by guaranteeing all bank deposits, our grateful banks slugged battlers more than $10 billion in banking fees, including $2.5 billion in penalties in 2008-09.

The fees charged against household customers and businesses include standard annual fees, management fees, travellers cheques, loan fees, "exception" penalties, merchant fees for credit cards, late payments, over limit, cash advances, foreign currency conversions, account servicing fees, transaction fees, overdrawn account fees, default fees, custodial services and establishment fees.

They must have whole departments dedicated to dreaming up new fees.

If your account so much as sneezes it's zapped. In 2012 alone the 17 banks made $11.4 billion from fees imposed on household and business accounts.

But, hang on, there's more. Not all banks are so gracious or generous with their interest rates.

Of the $50.2 billion which Australians owed on their credit and charge cards in February this year, 70 per cent was accumulated interest.

And, the banks just love dangling the carrot; that delusional figment of our imagination, which usually peaks around lotto night.

Since February 2000 the credit card limits imposed by the banks - the extent to which we can max out our credit cards - has grown from $36 billion to $143 billion.

Banks were never meant to exist on savings. It's the interest they're after.

Speaking of debt, we owed the banks $1.34 trillion on our mortgages in February. That's almost as much as Australia's total economic output. The banks will never go broke unless we all do.

They're sitting on more than $2trillion in assets and together the big four make about $27billion a year in profits.

That's why economically we don't look like a southern hemisphere Greece.

Kevin Rudd was right to protect them during the GFC because a healthy banking sector is a given in a robust economy.

Yeah, that's true, but cyclone Joe Hockey is due to hit landfall on budget day in May and we expect these giant poker machines to do their bit. Current banking reforms only include transparency and bans on things like exit fees applying to new mortgages.

Don't hold your breath. Treasurer Hockey is not about to nationalise the banks or their profits.

It has been tried before and was thrown out by the High Court.

It will be fascinating to see if he has the nerve to hit the banks with even a tiny ask on budget night; assuming he is going to hit everyone else.