Let me move on to expenses and give you a little color on the fourth quarter. Let me then tie up for the full year over year comparison and then give you our outlook for 2015 with some run rate outlook. As Mike said, our fourth quarter non-interest expense was $84.8 million, an increase of $14.5 million from the previous quarter which reflects an awful lot of noise, substantially the integration and operating cost of three acquisitions.
Some additional staffing and higher salaries and recruiting costs in response to growth and organizational needs that Mark just alluded to. Some targeted remediation actions and the timing of certain comp and benefit accruals impacted in part by the strong performance and timely integration of our acquisitions.
Specifically, we have $5.5 million of additional integration and conversion expense and for your benefit, we’ve broken it out separately on a single line item. That is simply the integration costs associated with the acquisitions and not the ongoing operating cost of these entities. $2.5 million additional costs to operate and manage the acquired banks, including Great Lakes for one month and National Machine Tool as well as certain one-time recruitment and sign-on bonuses related to the additional staff to come meet these acquisitions and these were primarily sales staff. $2.1 million for the targeted remediation actions to work out a number of substantial credits which contributed as Mike alluded to, to the overall improvement in our credit metrics which included a $1.6 million write-down on our single largest OREO property. That property makes up about 1/6th of our total OREO balance.
Then we had some a $900,000 increase from the third quarter into the non-qualified deferred comp expense that just bounces around from one quarter to another and is offsetting fees. In this case, it added $900,000 to our expense relative to the previous quarter. And the remainder relates to compensation of benefits adjustments comprised of lower deferred loan origination expense as we had slightly lower loan production than what we had anticipated and adjustments to the annual retirement in short-term incentive comp accruals which were impacted once again by the timely integration, the earlier acquisition of Great Lakes quite frankly and just the strong performance associated with credit.
Obviously, a lot of noise in the quarter that makes it difficult to project a run-rate, but before I get to that, let me cover the year over year comparison of expenses by will. Non-operating expenses for the full year were $283.8 million which included $14 million of integration costs for the full year and $6 million of operating costs associated with the three acquisitions. Excluding the costs associated with acquisition expenses increased 2.8% from 2013 which we think is evidence of pretty good cost control efforts to our core structure given that we are supporting a bank that grew nearly 15% over the back half of the year as Mike mentioned.
Now let me move to our expectations for 2015. Given all the integration noise in the fourth quarter, I think it’s probably easier to use the third quarter as a base and eliminate the $3.7 million of integration costs in that quarter as well as the $2 million of proper operating costs in that quarter and just talk about the core for just a second. This results in a quarterly core operating expense of around $64.5 million to $65 million. If one presumes our core increase of 2% to 3% as it did in 2014 which will take into consideration the realignment in addition that Mark alluded to, as well as the standard salary increase in those types of things, offset by initiatives that we have planned. If you assume that and then you simply add about $5 to $5.5 million which is what we think is the ongoing recurring operating cost of these acquisitions, you get to roughly $72 million.
We have the benefit of going through our budget process and feel pretty confident about the additional cost those acquisitions will throw onto our income statement and I will add that those reflect the 30% cost savings and the 40% cost saves that we performed in our acquisition of both those Popular and Great Lakes respectively.
