When we moved in February, the distance between our house and our bank doubled. No longer desiring to drive almost forty minutes, just to deposit a check, I recently opened a new checking account at a small, locally-owned bank, just two minutes from our house.
My wife an I now have four checking accounts – a free, no-frills personal account, at our old bank, a free, business-only account, at our old bank, an online interest-bearing account, with ING Direct, and the new, interest-bearing, joint account at the local bank. We also have a savings account, again, with ING Direct.
The new account has some pretty interesting features. First, it pays interest, and at a pretty decent rate. Right now, the rate is a little bit more than 3%. That’s a great rate for the current banking environment. Second, for any accrued interest to be credited to the account, we must use our debit card a minimum of 12 times per month. Third, the account requires one auto-draft or electronic deposit, per month.
In a twist, and due to the fact that we use online banking to pay all of our bills, when I opened the account, I didn’t order any checks. Why? We just don’t need them. We still have our old checking account and a box of checks associated with it. If we need to write an actual, physical check, we’ll just use one from that account. To be honest, we only write 1, or maybe 2, checks per month.
The account also offers a refund of ATM fees. This is great, because there are times that I travel and will not be near a local branch. Now, when I need cash, I can get it, two or three times a month, and I will not have to worry about fees. Awesome.
I’m in the process of updating my online bill-pay information, migrating from one bank to the other. This is a rather laborious process, an the main reason we waited eight months before opening the new account. So far, I’ve added information for most monthly bills, our mortgage payment, and daycare.
Now that we have the new bank, we can deposit checks locally. Should we need to make a deposit to our old account, I’ll simply “route” the money through our ING Direct Checking Account, from the new bank to the old. The process might take a week or so, allowing for enough time for the money to leave the new bank, arrive at ING Direct, leave ING Direct, and arrive at the old bank. It’s a shame that we can’t link the brick-and-mortar checking accounts, but this system should work just fine. Our system is similar to the one Nickel described when “mapping out his financial accounts“.
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