When it is all said and done it will have taken us several months to actually change banks.  We’re actually leaving our old bank to switch to a credit union.  This is something that I like because firstly it’s a local financial institution, and secondly credit unions are much more service oriented in many cases because they have members who the employees are serving rather than some person that is not directly their ‘boss’.  When I asked the employee at the credit union if I could do various things that my old bank wanted to penalize me (unnecessarily) for he simply said, “Yes, you can do that.”  How about situation two? “Yes, you can do that, too.”  Are there fees for this?  Do I have to jump through this hoop?  “No, there are no fees for that and we don’t own a hoop holder to put a hoop there for you to jump through.” [I made that last answer up, but he said the same thing in meaning, even if my imagination makes him more funny.]

The hardest part is the automatic withdrawals and direct deposits.  Those seem to take weeks and up to months to get swapped over.  And they want voided checks.  And they warn you not to close down your old account until (insert some date/time here).  Seriously: in the age of computers and databases are we that slow that what takes me seconds to enter into an online form takes weeks and months to process?

The Credit Union is not officially supported by Mint [and they are not presently working on supporting it], but I’m OK with that.  I will likely pay for and install You Need A Budget and use that with regular downloads of our data.  There are downsides to changing institutions like re-entering online billpay accounts.  But those are minor in comparison to being nickel and dimes and treated like a money tree that needs regular pruning.

I look forward to being a member of a local credit union with staff that treat me like a human being.