Okay,
Yesterday i went to my bank and what i wanted done was this. Open a money market account, transfer my entire savings to the MM account, close my savings account.
They said sure, no problem, it will be effective immediatly.
Well, they got half of it right. They opened my MM account but then closed my savings, with ALL my savings in it. The funds just disappeared.
What do i do???
Eek. This might not be fixable until the end of the Thanksgiving weekend. However, there is hope. Banks tend to process things like account closures and transfers in batch jobs at night. There is a chance that your funds have only disappeared temporarily and will appear on your new MM account tomorrow, or maybe not until Monday.
If it doesn’t happen by Monday, the best bet is to go to your local branch and ask them to look into it. If you have a receipt or copies of forms from any of the transactions, make sure you bring them.
I don’t really understand. How could they open your money market account with a zero balance. Are you sure that the money isn’t in your MM account? Could there possibly a positive balance, but the “available funds” shows zero? This shouldn’t be the case on a direct transfer like that – all the money should be available. But if you’d opened the account with a check, the funds might not be immediately available until the check cleared. Could they have processed it incorrectly?
How do you know there’s no funding in it? If you are looking online, it make take a day or three to get the account setup. Even if you can see the account, it might not be completely up and running until some other things are done behind the scenes. If you’re not desperate for the money, I’d wait until Friday and stop at the branch or call.
Well i signed a statement that allowed them to electronically transfer funds. There is no account history or transfer history in the MM account, and the savings account is unavailable for viewing since it doesnt exist any more.
Assume that the transaction just hasn’t posted to the MM account yet. If it hasn’t shown yet, it probably won’t till Friday morning, since Thanksgiving isn’t a banking day.
Give it a couple of business days. The transaction likely just hasn’t completed yet. About a month ago I transfered my RRSP(roughly the equivalent of a US IRA) from my bank to the bank’s brokerage house. There was a period of a couple days where the money just didn’t appear in either my bank’s website or my brokerage account.
I don’t know how similar things are up here as they are south of the border, but like Rysto I’ve had money seem to completely vanish temporarily when going from a conventional bank account to a mutual fund account. As others have suggested, I’d wait until at least Monday and then look again.
ETFs between different banks take a few days. Transfers within the same bank should be instantaneous in my experience. Is the MM fund at the bank itself or at an investment firm that partners with the bank?
Didn’t they give you a receipt when they completed the transaction? Ideally, it should say: Savings Account Withdrawal: ###.##. Money Market Account Deposit: ###.## where both are the same amount. If it doesn’t say that, why did you move from in front of the teller until you understood what it did say?
Generally there are two parts to each transaction done in a bank, a credit and a debit. The whole process depends on your bank of course, but generally in order to move the money, the banker will write make out a debit from your savings account, then write up a credit for the money market account. Sometimes this is done behind the scenes, so you might not have actually witnessed it being done. A teller will either cash out the debit memo, emptying your savings account, and make the corresponding deposit into your money market as cash (but could still take a day or two to show up for reasons I’ll explain in a minute). The other way is if they process the debit as a check, meaning the funds from your savings account would most likely be put on hold (no longer available, but still in the account) until the debit is processed the night of the business day it was initiated on. Usually a new account won’t process until the night of the business day you are on. So let’s say you went in and opened your account Monday, after 5 (or whatever time they cut over to the next business day) you won’t actually see your account until Wednesday morning, because it wasn’t processed until Tuesday night.
Most likely your transaction hasn’t been processed yet. I would give it one full business day, then maybe go back to the bank and see what’s going on. It is possible someone made a mistake with an account number, and your money was accidentally placed in someone else’s account. If that was the case, it will be an easy fix. There is some kind of paper or digital trail for almost everything done in the bank. You might have to go down there and get it straightened out, but I don’t think you have anything to worry about concerning your money going missing permanently.
Even though the account might not be visible to you anymore, they will be able to access it and look to see where the money went.
I hope this helps.
They’ve likely shuffled your money into an interest-bearing account in order to collect that nth of a percent on your money that they then keep. It takes zero time to transfer a bank balance from one account to another within the same bank: just a few key strokes. Unless you have some other use for the cash, even for a short period. Banks are NOT your friends.