Should I Drop Chase Bank?

"Chase your money" indeed!

I have frequently said to myself that if ING DIRECT could get remote deposit figured out, I'd close my Chase account. Here's some back story.

Several months ago, I posted how enamored I was with J.P. Morgan Chase because they allowed me to deposit checks remotely (even though I was also cranky with them because they made it difficult to make online payments). These issues aside, I've not been pleased with how Chase and other big banks handled themselves during the financial crisis of 2008, and I'm especially not happy with Chase losing over $2 billion in what were supposed to be low-risk hedges.* While I didn't take part in last year's push by many financial bloggers to close their big-bank checking accounts and move their money to credit unions, I appreciated the idea and thought long and hard about doing so.

All that said, I keep another set of bank accounts through ING DIRECT. Unfortunately, for much of its existence, to use ING DIRECT in a timely manner you basically needed another checking account to transfer money in and out of. You could send them checks, but that seemed like such an antiquated method considering ING was an online bank. It was like somebody offering you a free place to store your valuables, but in order to get your valuables to that location, you needed to send them via horse and buggy. What are we, Amish?

However, these draconian deposit methods are no longer the norm. As of last month, ING DIRECT has added remote deposit. As Five Cent Nickel has done a good job of explaining ING's rules for remote deposit, I'll leave you to look over the specifics there. A couple of those rules stand out, especially ones regarding limits of what how much money can be deposited and how quickly those funds will be available for use.

One cool option that ING DIRECT gives with this remote deposit is that one can either snap pictures via smartphone (like Chase does), or folks can scan the image at home and deposit online via computer. While I haven't tried the computer scanning option yet, I'm tempted to like this better than the cell phone option, as, at least with Chase, I frequently have to snap more than one picture as the first one isn't clear enough, and the Chase app on my iPhone makes me take another one.

And yet...

I'm finding it difficult to close my Chase account, and I'm having a hard time discerning why. I've written before that nostalgia can be a chief reason people make bad financial decisions, but I don't think I'm nostalgic for this account. In the first place, this account started when I opened my account with Washington Mutual back in 2000; Chase only took over my account when it took over WaMu after WaMu failed in 2008. Chase has since added fees to WaMu's "free" checking accounts, though I've largely been able to circumvent these charges due to getting paid via direct deposit (direct deposit being one of the handful of exceptions you can use to keep your checking accounts "free").

I think I just like the safety that comes with the ability to go into a brick and mortar bank. For instance, though many ATMs allow you to deposit cash, I very rarely take advantage of this. Though I've never had any problems with deposits, it feels like if there were ever a problem, I'd just be out my cash. With cash, I much prefer to go to a teller, have him or her count it, and get my receipt knowing that there can't be any confusion about my deposit.

I guess that's my sticking issue: depositing cash. To be fair, to my knowledge, there's no way to deposit physical cash to ING DIRECT, so this whole blog post has been something of a red herring. I set up what my conditions were, and I then went with an undisclosed condition. I'll keep my Chase account open for the time being. Feel free to leave your hate at my misdirection in the comments.**

On the subject of comments, does anybody out there ONLY have an online checking/savings account with no corresponding brick and mortar account? Would you consider doing so? Let me know.

*There's got to be more to this story than Chase is letting on. While J.P. Morgan has admitted that the traders in charge of those funds were using different risk rules than the rest of the company, it smells awfully fishy that the "safe" investments the traders were supposedly choosing caused such a big loss.
**While I guess I've made up my mind for now, if I ever have to start paying a fee for Chase's checking account, I'll pretty certainly close it. I suspect I'll trade it for a free checking account from a credit union rather than going all online though.

Photo by neoliminal.

Update 05/29/2012: This post was featured in the Carnival of Personal Finance #363.

It May Not Be So Easy to Close Your Chase Bank Account

Here's a story about a person who closed down his Chase account one day, only to have reopened a few days later to the tune of over a hundred bucks in overdraft fees.

"Remember how I said closing my account at Chase was really easy? ... A week or two later, I'm going through the mail and there's all this mail from Chase—overdraft notices for my Chase checking account. Which is supposed to be closed. The notices are for two debit card transactions and two auto-pay electronic checks. Instead of the payments not going through, like you would expect of a closed checking account, all four were paid by Chase, which then added an overdraft fee of $34 to each one, meaning $136 in overdraft fees."

I guess the banks want to make sure we all stay their customers.  It's enough to make me want to close my own Chase account (even though I love how easy it is to deposit checks).

Will any of you be switching to credit unions on November 5 as a part of National Bank Transfer Day?  If so, follow the above article's advice and cut out debit card transactions as soon as you can to avoid any overdraft fees of your own (debit card transactions can take a few days to post to your bank account).  Also, if you're switching banks, let me know in the comments.

Chase, or How I Love Technology

A couple of weeks ago, I complained about how Chase made it difficult to make payments towards my credit card.  While I still think that that is a lousy policy on their part, there is another aspect to their banking that I really enjoy.

When I got my iPhone, one of the first handful of apps that I downloaded were banking apps, and, for those who don't know, the Chase Bank app does something pretty nifty.  It lets me take pictures of my checks and it automatically deposits them.  I don't have to go into my branch anymore.  While I don't receive a whole lot of checks in general (my paycheck is directly deposited across three accounts), when I do receive the odd check, being able to use my phone to deposit it is terrifically convenient.

What can I say?  I, like Kip, love technology.



As far as downsides, probably the main one is that if you don't take a very clear picture of the check, the app won't accept it.  This can be maddening after a couple of tries.  However, and maybe I'm just getting better at it, but the last few times I've deposited checks, the first picture that I've taken has worked.

The only other downside is that I, irrationally, feel like I need to hold onto the physical checks after I've deposited them (in case Chase runs an audit or something).  I'll have to recheck Chase's terms, but holding onto these is probably a bad plan, as it will be difficult in the future to remember which checks I have and have not deposited.  I'd hate to get charged a fee by trying to deposit an already cashed check.

How about you?  What technological methods do you use to make your financial life easier?  Let me know in the comments.

Does Your Credit Card Make It Difficult?

I am happy to report that for the last several months, I have been paying my credit card off in full every month. However, and maybe I'm a weirdo, but I have a hard time paying a big lump sum of money all at once. For example, if I owe $500, it's easier for me psychologically to make two $200 payments and one $100 payment than it is to make one large payment of $500.

It's unreasonable, I know, particularly when I also know that I have been able to budget for the whole amount due. What can I say? At least I'm paying it all off.

Normally, my smaller payments work swimmingly. I make my smaller payments, my card's balance shrinks, and I finish the balance due off by the end of the month. However, a few minutes ago, I ran into a small snag.

My primary credit card is the Chase Freedom card because I like cash-back rewards combined with no annual fees. I made a small payment on 7/31, and I tried to make a small payment again today, but I received an error message that stated that I was unable to make my payment due to the fact that I had submitted another payment within the last three days.

I can't think of a good reason why Chase would implement this policy, other than they are trying to "catch" people, like me, who make smaller payments. While it's not a big deal for me not to be able to pay today (my billing period end date is 8/26), if I were facing this situation on the last day that payments were due (and thus, facing the prospect of getting charged interest on the balance carried), I'd be pretty upset.

The only logical reason I could give for Chase to implement this policy is that it must cost the banks something to send money to one another. However, Chase is my primary bank, so Chase is denying me the ability to move cash money from one Chase account to another Chase account! It's ridiculous!

Have you ever hit up against credit cards making it difficult to make payments, or otherwise hassling you in an (apparent) attempt to collect fees from you? How did you work it out?