Appreciate the info. Which coin would you suggest has the best mining rate in case I swap to another in the future?
The only coins that have a congestion problem are Bitcoin and Ethereum. Everything else has an empty blockchain so fees will never be above the standard rate which should always be low.
If you're using it to transfer between exchanges and sell again to buy other stuff then obviously it needs to be a coin with a lot of volume that's easy to sell without losing anything. Litecoin is probably the most common option.
I'm not sure which services have a fixed fee. For beginners, I know that blockchain.info is a pretty common wallet, but I know that you can adjust fee on that service. Electrum and other wallets that more experienced people use almost always have an adjustable fee amount.
Regardless of that, I think it's not worth it to put a small fee in with your transaction. Most services need at least 1 confirmation, so you want to hit that ASAP. If you don't, your transaction could be reversed. For now, try to wait it out a little. It's possible that fees go down soon, but if you really need to get a transaction through, maybe you could try to move more $ in a single transaction.
Quite a few still do have a fixed fee, but it's the services like exchanges sending out to you that will hurt more. They don't give you a fee option and certain ones are insane. An exchange I use for XEM charges what is now $16 to send it out when the real fee is a cent or two.