Pretty simple question, I guess. I bank pretty much exclusively with ING Direct and was wondering how the current crisis will affect my accounts with them (if at all). Can anyone help me out here? I must confess to not really understanding a lot of what’s going on, so I’m sorry if this is a stupid question.
I was kind of leery of banking exclusively online to begin with, but is there anything else I need to be worried about in light of current events?
I’m curious, too.
Do you bank with ING, too, Bosda?
ING is based in the Netherlands, so issues affecting the U.S. banking industry are unlikely to concern them unless this becomes a worldwide problem.
Ed
Does this mean they aren’t covered by FDIC insurance? Scary,if it’s true.
The homepage for ING Direct states "Member FDIC ". They are based in the NL but also are incorporated (or whatever the word I’m looking for here) in Delaware.
The concern is worldwide. A lot of overseas financial institutions are holding notes and derivatives from the US financial institutions that are in trouble. Being a foreign bank isn’t an immunity from the crisis. I don’t know if you saw the story about the German bank that transferred $8 billion to Lehman just before they went under. The Germans were going ape-shit over that fiasco and asking how it could have happened. In the US those kinds of news stories don’t get much ink.
I can’t answer for ING but the world financial markets are so convoluted that everybody is affected. It’s like AIG, they are so big and so pervasive that it is hard to find someone who isn’t affected by them in some way.
Okay, I think I might need to clarify what I’m asking about here.
I have a checking account and a couple of savings accounts with ING Direct, which, as Queen Bruin pointed out, is based in the States. The savings accounts are just regular accounts, not CDs or anything like that. The checking account earns a little interest, too.
What I’m really trying to find out is whether or not anything could happen to that money because of the current credit crisis. I’m thinking the answer is probably “no” because, as pointed out earlier, they are insured by FDIC, but I wasn’t one hundred percent sure.
But is that what being insured by FDIC means? That no matter what, your money is safe? (Up to $100,000, anyway.)
Yep. You will receive your money back, guaranteed.
However, access to that money might be a wee bit tricky for a week or so after a failure. If you needed to negotiate a large cash transaction on short notice with your shady Colombian colleagues, you might have trouble.
ING does not have a ‘significant’ exposure the the sub-prime mess. To be more accurate, I haven’t read anything in the financial press, the people i know at ING all believe they dodged the bullet. If ING had a big exposure, it would have been disclosed by now.
visit the ING website and check the regulatory filings to be sure.