Oh. My. God leaving your bank is difficult. After *cough years with one of the blue
banks, I started to feel that my faithfulness and invested money maybe wasn’t
getting the best treatment. And so I started
shopping around and discovered all sorts of free chequing accounts available and
perhaps even worse that my own bank was waiving fees for those with multiple
accounts – like me. But not like me because
nobody ever mentioned this offer to me. In
spite of the fact that they telemarketed me at least three times a week and didn’t leave a
message. Needless to say after banking
at the same place since I was a teenager, I decided I was done. I walked my butt over to one of the red banks
and signed myself up for a new free chequing account. Then I started moving all the prearranged
payments company by company to the new account.
Then I moved my RSP. Then I applied
for a line of credit. Then I waited.
At this point it’s been almost 8 weeks and we’re still
waiting on some of this and honestly, it might be easier to divorce a spouse
than a major financial institution.
First, it takes you about 3 pay cycles to figure out what
comes out of your account and when. Or
at least it did for me. Then it takes
each of them about 3 weeks to move these so you need another pay cycle to confirm
that the move was made. So I get paid
bi-monthly. If I remembered on the 13th
that something came out of my account on the 15th, and I called to
make new arrangements, because I remembered so late, it took another month to
confirm that everything was hunky dory.
Secondly it takes 4 to 6 weeks and some paperwork to move an
RSP. And dealing with a venue-less bank means
you do all of this over the phone and (eek) fax. And if you’re like me, they keep sending your confirmations to your misspelled e-mail
address. Which is almost like not
sending them at all.
You will have to remember and repeat a lot of things about
your financial life to many people many times.
Have you ever missed a bill payment? Answer ‘Never’, ‘Occasionally’, ‘Often’. So there’s no point in fibbing because you’ve
just given six people permission to pull your credit report, but honestly the
only answer reasonable is ‘Occasionally’ because yes, I probably forgot to post
a payment once or twice in the 20 odd years I’ve had to pay a bill.
You will also learn a few new idiosyncrasies of your new
financial institutions. Among them PC Financial makes it so difficult
to set up a credit card password that, if you’re like me, you will forget it
instantly completely eradicating its effectiveness. And if you are on hold with ING as much as I
have been of late you will notice that they play only songs with the word ‘Money’
in them on their hold music. It’s
actually quite entertaining.
Finally, you will have to toggle between two institutions
until this is completed because otherwise you’re just writing cheques to
yourself and having to go into the bank branch – which I have spent the better
part of *cough years avoiding.
Hopefully all this malarkey will be over shortly as soon as
move the last of the balances over to one of my
two new red institutions and
finally give the blue bank the one finger salute goodbye.
I have a bottle of bubbly on ice for when this absurdity is
finally over. And other one for the un-cabling
of Rogers. Which is next. But not for awhile because if you’re like me,
there’s only so much of this you can take.
