Monday, February 26, 2007

Brick & Mortar Bank vs. Online Banks for Checking Accounts

Recently with the launch of ING's "Electric Orange" checking account I have started using this service more so rather than my checking account with Bank of America (BoA). One thing I disliked about BoA is that when the company bought out or merged (I forgot which one it was) with MBNA Bank, the billpay system on the site changed. This forced some of my payments to be send a day or 2 in advance when I didn't have enough funds in the account. My BoA checking account doesn't offer any interest, thus I normally transfer money over to an account at an online bank, who is offering a high interest rate. I eventually drilled down the BoA billpay system, but still did not like it too much. To protect myself from overdraft fees I opened a savings account just to play it safe and only keep the minimum amount required in it to avoid fees. I like that BoA has a lot of ATM locations, which are near almost all of the major areas I am in. After getting used to ING's checking account, I began to use it more and more. I just started using it last week and I am still testing the waters, but overall everything seems to be perfect. Billpay payments are sent on time. ING has a network of ATM's in many convenient locations as well. The only drawback of ING's checking account is that they do not offer any paper checks or allow you to print paper checks. To combat this I will probably keep my BoA checking account, but I hardly write any checks. I like to have paper checks as a trail for various payments or donations. Again I hardly use paper checks. I am going to probably close the savings account I have at BoA, since I hardly use it for the billpay service now. I must admit, I am getting hooked onto using ING's Electric Orange checking account. The best part is that ING offers a decent interest rate even for their checking accounts.

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