Tips For Banking On The Road
Banking Tips That We Should All Expect From Our Banks.
One of the questions I’m most often asked is about banking on the road. This can be a challenge or in my case relatively easy. It took nearly two years, and some missed payments, for us to figure out what we really needed from our bank.
For us the answer is we use the Internet to do our banking. I know that there are those that still don’t trust the Internet and that’s ok. We trust the security of the banks and other Internet business sites that we use. They are major intuitions and wouldn’t survive long if they weren’t safe. The biggest fear of the Internet security seems to be sending and receiving confidential information.
Truth is there is very little of confidential information transmitted during an online session and even then all transmissions are sent encoded such that only the institution you are online with can decipher it. The Internet is much safer than a land telephone or cell phone. Think about this, if you use a cordless phone at homey our conversations can be picked up by any police type scanner.
We have several reasons why we chose the banks that we use, some are more important because we are on the road.
1. The bank must have a presents coast to coast. If the bank has only offices in the east or west we won’t use it. There is nothing like needing something from your bank and it’s on the other side of the country.
2. No fees! Other than for check printing and things like that …no fees….I don’t want to pay for anything. Speaking of checks, I can’t tell you when the last check that I wrote was. A book of checks will last quite a long time if you use the banks features.
3. The bank we use reimburses us for all atm transactions. This is a great thing, not all banks do it but it sure is nice not to have to pay to use a teller or even worse try to find one of your banks branches.
4. This one is a must! Intelligence on the phone, you’re not going to get to many chances with us. If and when we need to use a banks customer service we want real answers, not the runaround.
5. Here is another nice thing if you can get it. Free postage envlopes for deposits.
6. Complete online banking. We need complete online access and that includes
A. Checking of balances
B. Ability to transfer money from one account to another
C. Ability to transfer money from one bank to another
D. The ability to write checks and pay bills on line.
E. Online support
F. Ability to accept ebilling and auto pay of those bills.
G. Ability to view those rare checks that I write online.
We actually use two banks one is a credit union that we have had forever and provides most of what we were looking for even before we hit the road. The other is a “dot com bank”, it has no offices or tellers but is everything we were looking for and it pays interest on our checking account.
