Money

[bertine]

gwangi and I have been having this conversation lately about where we should have our money when we merge our finances more.*

I have only ever "banked" at a credit union and Zach thinks we should go to a regular bank because he want more access to ATMs, branches and places to deposits checks.

What I like about the credit union is that I have had good customer service there in the 20 years I have an account there and they have handled my two mortgages, one of my car loans (the other one was with the dealer) and my credit card with them has a good interest rate and points that I use to get rewards.

I don't know what a bank does for you other than have a lot of locations and do shady things.


*I am not sure how much we are going to merge them yet but we are going to have some joint stuff and I am pretty sure we are going to put everything at the same "bank" because writing checks back and forth is annoying.

Comments

What she said!

[jayp39.livejournal.com]

We have the best of both worlds, although the setup is kind of complicated.

I have an account with the local bank here, which I use for depositing checks and ATMs. That bank doesn't have any branches where Paloma lives, so she has a different local bank down there.
Then we each have ING accounts + a joint ING account.

I can't speak for exactly how Paloma uses ING but I keep most of my money in ING, only a few hundred for easy ATM access at the local bank. I have direct deposit going to ING, and all my bill pay is from there. I haven't written a check in many years...in fact I don't remember where my checkbook is. ING can link up to your other bank accounts and transfer money to/from them easily.

We only use the joint account when we owe each other money, since we share some bills and stuff (family cell phone plan etc). If I owe Paloma money I just transfer money to the joint account and tell her it's there, and vice versa. If we wanted to combine our finances more, I think we could do so with the exact same setup, except set up automatic transfers to the joint account and have bill pay come out of there.