My New E*Trade Account Sucks

This weekend I opened a Complete Savings Account at E*Trade. It was at 4.4% interest with no minimum and pretty light restrictions. I want this account to tuck away the money I am saving for my 2008 Property Taxes and Christmas.

The account itself is probably fine (I hope,) it is just the E*Trade Instructions and communication has been horrid! I get a note saying the account is set up, but then I can't see it on the Log-in page. I try to set up My Wells Fargo Checking to be able to transfer in; it grabs my information and then clears out the UI...Over and Over. You can't tell it is set up until you get an error message telling you that you already set it up!

Then you have to verify the account...but it doesn't tell you how, or walk you through it! I finally got that set up and the money is out of my checking ($100 in seed money in case it didn't work). So now I can see my Wells Fargo Account in my E*Trade account...but not my E*Trade account!

Guess what?...no way to email them about it, you gotta call...an EBank? I am busy here folks! In the mean time the 4.4% account that I signed up for is now 4.1%! I knew the rate was subject to change, but wow!

This was also an experiment of sort for me as I have never really had a bunch of accounts to take advantage of higher rate. I just left everything extra in my Wells Fargo Savings drawing a whopping 1% interest. It was tied to my checking account as overdraft protection, which was good as we were not exactly...on it before. It saves us a bunch of late fees.

Here is the new plan:

• Checking - $300 - After all bills keep amount due to potential medical bills and pharmacy needs. It is interest bearing, but the amount is like 0.25%!
• Savings - $2000+ - This is our Emergency Fund, Baby Step #1. We have $74 auto-transferred each 15th of the month. This coupled with a minimum in savings ($1000) and using bill pay gives me the best Wells Fargo Rate: 1%
• E*Trade - (Eventually)$5000+/- - This were I want to save for our longer bills like Property Taxes and Christmas. Now at 4.1%. When we get to Baby Step #3 (3-6 months expenses) we may put that here as well.

Seems like a good plan to me! But feeling a bit stupid that I went with E*Trade. Well I understand why they didn't have a great reputation on bankrate.com (which is a great site BTW).

How about any of you? Been through he same thing? Worse with an online savings account?

I am really glad I am playing Golf this weekend!

Emergency Fund vs Ninja Bills...

Many self-help finance books discuss the need to have some back-up Emergency Fund. Well for years I resisted, and I am sure some of you are right now as well.

"I have Credit Cards! Why would I stick my hard earned money in a savings account with less then 1% of Interest. I am so much more flexible this way I have the access to emergency funds in my wallet at all times!"

Problem was I was using my card for everything: car expenses, golf clubs, trips, signed pictures of Bradgelina (kidding). I wasn't paying them off every month and often when something would come up I would rob Peter to pay Paul (or at least blackmail him).

For the last 90-days I have had a $2000 Emergency Fund in my Wells Fargo Savings attached to my Checking account. We came up with that amount by looking back for the last few years issues that have come up. Car issues, Home issues, illness and found that while most were under $1000, a couple (car) were closer to $2000. This cushion helped us sleep at night knowing that if most things came up we could handle them.

How did we get it saved up? Basically we paid the very minimum on anything we could, i refinanced a much lower rate on some bills and paid our property taxes and we had some left over. (Before we would of spent this as a bonus to ourselves for being so good!) It took a couple of months with NO extras for us.

But now we have it. This fund is especially great for what I call Ninja bills. When you are first getting your finances together bills seemingly pop out of nowhere...like Ninjas..."Honey what is this bill from a Wine Club?" "What is this old gym bill still being sent", etc..

In the old system Ninjas were deadly. If we had the credit we charged it, if not we would get some stupid interest signature loan until my next (hopefully) bonus.

This is known in psych terms as a viscous circle. No money to pay debt so you borrow to pay debt which you can't pay back because of your debt...

Now we have had a couple Ninja jump out at us, but we have defeated the evil "nomoney clan" with our emergency fund armor.

We broke the circle. Now even when things come up we can handle it. We only use the fund for emergencies (non-shopping kind!). Since then we haven't yet had to touch a credit card!

In the words of Keanu Reeves...we know Kung Fu...