Mokka mit Schlag » Finance

Just a quick note that Washington Mutual’s advertised “free checks for life” is a lie. After opening an account with them, they did indeed send me some free checks. However the checks they sent were incorrect and not what I ordered. When I attempted to replace them, they wanted to charge me $25 (more than I would pay through a 3rd party printer) and flatly refused to honor their promise of free checks for life.

If they lie about something this trivial, what else are they lying about? If they can’t even get a basic check order right, do I really want to trust them with my money?

On top of that, WAMU doesn’t support Quicken for the Mac (again, despite telling me they did). Time to look for a new bank.

Yesterday I finally got around to filing the paperwork to officially transfer my account from the TD Ameritrade spammers to Scotttrade. I should have done this months ago when I first realized the problem, but I’m not an active trader and it always seems like there’s more interesting things to do than filling out forms.

I had considered various online brokers, but there weren’t as many choices as I expected. Scotttrade seemed to have the best combination of low fees and decent user interface. Internet gossip about them was relatively positive compared to what was said about other online brokerages. The kicker was the local offices where I could drop off paperwork and get immediate feedback instead of having to mail forms back and forth for a few weeks. USAA was a close second. If Scotttrade doesn’t work out, I may switch to them.

The transfer itself is supposed to take 7-10 business days. I’ll let you know how it goes. I’ll need to make a test trade to make sure it all works once the money and equities are shifted over. There’s nothing in my portfolio I want to sell right now. I guess I’ll have to buy something. Anyone have a hot tip?

So I spend a few hours struggling with Quicken, trying to make it download my mutual fund info. Eventually I fire off an e-mail to tech support and wait. Then when scanning my Inbox toniuught to see if they’ve replied yet, I notice that I had the same damn problem last year. It’s Quicken’s fault, and they still haven’t fixed it. Quicken cannot download transactions for single mutual funds. Doesn’t matter what brokerage you use or what the user name and password are or what options you set. Quicken simply cannot download transactions for a single mutual fund account. Full stop.

So here I am manually entering all my mutual fund statements one more time. Word of warning: if you have more than a couple of mutual funds held outside brokerage accounts, Quicken is not for you. I wonder if Microsoft Money can do this? or GnuCash?

You know those annoying image spams that seem to be getting through a lot of spam filters lately? Well I now have at least one company to blame for them: TD Ameritrade.
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Citibank has launched a service that I’ve wanted for a long time. You can now create a unique credit card number for each and every transaction that can only be used once. Perfect for those sites that want to charge you $9.95 for the first month and then rebill you every month until the second coming.
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Twice in the last two days I’ve caught programmed cash registers scanning a different price than was clearly advertised. Once was in a fairly nice restaurant that added $2 to the price of a glass of Bourbon; once was in a sporting goods store that added a $1 to the price of a pair of rubber boots.

Maybe it’s just a fluke, and I only took note because it happened to me so close together in time; but maybe it’s an increasing problem as more pricing gets automated without effective checks and balances; and just maybe it’s not a mistake at all but a deliberate and dishonest way to raise prices.
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