I’ve been a B of A customer for about 7 years. There is a noticeable difference, at least to me, on how they treat you if you don’t have direct deposit vs. having direct deposit. When I didn’t have direct deposit, they were pretty bad about fees for everything and if I made a checking mistake they never covered it but bounced it sky high with a ton of big fees. I then got hit with a $25!! bill simply for using the phone account service over a certain amount. When I called to deal with that, I got a decent person who halved the fee and told me about direct deposit and how it would prevent that from happening.
I got the direct deposit about 5 years ago and I’ve been almost completely happy with them since. I did have an issue where another bank put in a $65 check in as $650 and I thought 3 days to get my money back in my account was ridiculous. However, the people I dealt with were otherwise helpful and they covered my checks until the money showed back up.
I made a mistake and sent an insurance check too soon and the company cleared it electronically. My rent check was put through the same day, it was about a $300 negative balance and when I RUSHED down to the bank to cover it , they were very helpful, were not judgemental or rude, and did not return my rent check and only charged me one reasonable fee. I think it would have been very different if I had not been a long time direct deposit customer.
I love their online banking- especially that you can write checks electronically and they mail them out for you. I bought one of my dogs that way and it was nice to send the check to the breeder and have the $ taken out right away instead of having this big chunk of money just waiting to clear (ok, so I could be better about checkbook balancing). The site is really easy to use, unlike my past credit union (to be fair, that was some time ago, but I was always double paying my loans and stuff when I used their site).
We have our mortgage and a home equity line of credit through them. They couldn’t have been nicer during the process of the LoC. I don’t know if it was my good credit score or not, but we got the line approved with no hassle.
The mortgage was sold and sold and sold again, and is now with WAMU. Again, no problems, but I pay a little extra each month, so they like me.
Seriously, though, I’m just going by my husband’s advice on this one, he prefers to get loans from BECU for whatever reason, I guess he had some loan trouble with WAMU several years ago.
However, our credit is now pristine, and they’re falling all over themselves to serve us ever since we deposited a couple hundred thousand (a nice inheritance!), so I suppose I should honestly say that I could be a little biased.
He’s looking to switch us over to BECU fully sometime next year, I believe.
But my personal experience with WAMU so far has been great, just for regular banking and such. Very friendly, very helpful. There was a mixup and a delay getting my debit card, but it was my husband’s fault (wrong address - twice :smack: ) But once I got it, they took me through it all step by step (I’m new to American debit cards), anytime I have questions or need to talk to them about the account, they are prompt and friendly.
I should apologise for popping in and out of this thread with little explanation and reason for my bias - it skews things a little and I should have been clearer. Humble apologies.
If this is all you need a bank branch for, get an account at a credit union. Generally, they are MUCH better on fees than banks are. I have accounts at Navy Federal and our State Employees Credit Union, and NFCU has never charged me a dime in fees (I’ve had that account since 1988). SECU charges me $1 a month for my checking account, but also gives me interest on it, so that’s usually a wash. All that’s required of me from either of them is to keep a small amount of money in a savings account ($5 for NFCU and $25 for SECU). I can do anything I need to do with either of them online or by phone, except for the occasional visit to the safe deposit box.
It’s been exceedingly easy for me to get loans with both of them, and SECU actually gave me a discount on my interest rate for my car because my employer lets them take the payment directly from my paycheck, and I don’t have to do anything - there’s no payment books or anything at all to worry about.
We have our main bank accounts with First Internet Bank of Indiana, and we have been very happy with them. Their rates are good, their fees are low, their web banking is quite good (as it should be, I guess). You can use any bank’s ATM, and FIBI will refund you up to $6/mo in “foreign” bank ATM charges. It takes a little longer to deposit money, since we have to do it by mail, but since my paycheck is direct deposited, we rarely have other deposits anyway.
I had a BayBank->Bank of Boston->Fleet (now BoA) account once, and it was horrific. It literally took me over two years to get it all the way closed - they kept sending me notices that I owed them $0.12, but there was no account to give it to them. (They closed the checking account, but not the overdraft protection “credit” account, and when they waived a mistaken fee on the overdraft protection account, they did not remove the interest. There was no way to put money into that account, not that I owed it anyway, and no way to close it. So they kept sending me notices and statements for years.) All that was before BoA acquired them, but if your local branch used to be Fleet, I’d be wary.
I use WAMU. My experience has been sort of meh. I like the free checking, and they were very helpful when I first moved here with waiving waiting periods and such so I could pay my first month’s rent and deposit and stuff on time. They pissed me off a lot, though, when they didn’t bother telling me that for the first couple months I’d have a one-week waiting period in depositing cash through the ATM. My fiance and his family have banked through WAMU for years and years and they love it. I miss my old credit union, though, and I’m thinking of looking for one here that I might qualify to join.
