The Bailey Building & Loan is Alive and Well in PA OR The Joys of Banking

No, I said Banking, not Baking......


Hubs & I have wanted to move our money to a credit union for some time now.
We finally pulled the trigger a few weeks ago.

We aren't the kind of folks you jump around from financial institution to financial institution.
If it's working for us somewhere, we stay put.

When we moved here in 2000 our huge national bank did not have a location closer than 30 minutes away.  While they had a branch near Hubs work it was darned inconvenient for me to do any banking.
So I opened up an account at the tiny local bank in our town so I could move the money between the 2 banks/accounts.

This worked ok for us until about 6 months ago, when our huge national bank was taken over by another huge national bank.
HNB #2 said we had to open up a different account in order to keep our old account since they didn't offer that old type of account anymore.
Otherwise, we'd have to pay fees for the honor of allowing them to hold and use our money.
How nice of them.....

So we opened the additional account with the min. they required of $100 and kept our real money in the old account.
If that was all it was going to take to make them happy, we figured we'd stick with them.
After all, they were one of the few big banks that didn't take TARP money.

Then they started pressing us to get debit cards for this "new" account.
I guess they figured they'd just keep at us and eventually make us start using this account as our main account, migrate our money over to this account and phase out the original account.
I don't like being pushed into anything, especially if I am not given a good reason to do so.
And then when we didn't ask for debit cards they mailed them to us anyway.  Hey, thanks for something I didn't want! lol

Next  they started calling here and dunning us via snail mail with great deals on stocks/bonds/mutual funds/cds/retirement plans/etc., as well as wanting us to come in to "speak with someone".....as in speak to someone who wanted to get control over investing our money.  No thanks!

I guess nobody ever heard of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" and "don't annoy the piss outta your customers" at this company.
The old huge bank let us be but this new huge bank was annoying as hell.
Which surprised us, since we had used this new bank as our mortgage company and we had been very pleased with them back then in that capacity.

Anyway this pestering came to a head last month and we looked around to move our money and move it to a local institution if possible.
And we found a local credit union.

So we went in, had a look-see and opened a savings and a checking account there.
Everyone says that Credit Unions are full of sunshine and lollipops....or is that rainbows?
I never can remember.
At the moment we have 3 accounts(not counting the ING one)-2 at banks and 1 at the credit union.
Having our money all over the place is not a good thing.....it's driving me to distraction.

Eventually the plan was to close down one of the bank accounts and keep the CU account and the small regional bank account.

And things went well with the CU until this week.

I have an ING account so I went online to link the 2 accounts.
And ING notified me that the small deposits had been made to confirm the linking so I went to check them at the CU.
And there were no deposits.
For 4 days I waited for them to show up.
And the routing and account numbers were checked and double checked.
But still no deposits.
Great......

And I went into the CU and the teller couldn't fine the deposits either.

And then I tried to deposit a personal check at the CU this week.
And the teller told me that I can't deposit a personal check into the checking account if it is for a LARGE sum of money....a business check was a different story.
I would have to deposit it in my savings account, wait for it to clear and then come back and move the money from savings into checking.
WTF?!
And then I asked her what was the cut-off amount that constituted a "Large sum of money".
$200 or more.
WTFF?!
$200 may be a "large sum of money" in Dhaka, Bangladesh or Mogadishu, Somalia but in middle class American, not so much.

And then she said that I had to wait 2+ days after depositing a check to withdraw it.
WTFFF?!
It's not a case of we don't have other funds in that account to cover if the check in question was bad.
None of this was mentioned at any point when we set up these accounts at the CU.

I'm under the impression that this CU thinks it's the Bailey Building and Loan and Uncle Billy is running things!

There is only so much bullshit I can take before I close this CU account down too.  Maybe I'll just stick to my back-up bank....the small regional one.


So let me know.....how many accounts do you have and at how many financial institutions?
Do you use a credit union or a bank and are you happy with whichever you use?

Sluggy