Saturday, September 29, 2007

WTFDIC?

So I got an email yesterday afternoon from a friend telling me to start checking on N.etB.ank. Because the FDIC shut them down. Um, I pay my mortgage from that account, did the check clear first? It wasn't as bad as hearing it from strangers, in that I got that email before I saw it on the news, but I'm thinking quick email from the bank or the FDIC wouldn't have gone amiss. I had almost stopped to get lunch cash from my N.et.Bank account and would have been hella confused in addition to resorting to last decade's slang.

It turns out that ING bought the accounts and everything is back up. But I had just had a brain flash a couple weeks ago to print out my recent account histories and totals, just in case, but then I thought "nah, I'll do it later". Well, today is later and I'm printing like mad. The numbers all seem to be normal so I hope I don't have more bad dreams about trying to prove my balances with handwritten numbers on post-it notes. "I swear, I looked it up just last week, honest! That money is MINE!"

Had I not been able to access my kitchen renovation fund for a couple months while the FDIC "protected me", I woulda been more than a tad tweaked. Especially since, in the way of business money, I'm not quite sure why only having a $0.2Billion reserve on $2B in assets requires drastic action. (I could have read the news article wrong, but that was my interpretation.) It kind of made me think they were getting the smackdown for being successful without kissing up to a brick and mortar bank. They've all had to improve service exponentially since Ne.tba.nk made the scene.

I really wish people would stop panicking about the mortgage situation. Did no one else watch those commercials saying "no money down, no credit check, we don't need proof of a job!" and think "that's a foreclosure waiting to happen!". But even so, can't a bank handle a 3% failure rate without collapsing? It just seems nuts.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Your banking system confuses me. I'll take ours anyday.

Dad says that those mortgages were low for 3 years and then you were to sell at a profit and payback the rest. If not you had a really high mortgage to pay.

But then you hit an economic slump AND a huge # of houses went on the market b/c of this pyramid scheme.

Hence the crash. There's been problems all over the world - I know of one in Germany and another in England over it. I think one of the banks here was in on it, but since they are gov't insured it came and went from the news asap.

S

Unknown said...

Fixed rate mortgages for the win!

Anonymous said...

It wasn't until I got back from vacation that I saw the online banks lowering the interest on their high interest accounts. Boooooooo! I'm sorry you got caught up in that netbank fiasco. I agree with you, that the whole mortgage reaction by the market is overblown and if they didn't like it, they shouldn't have sold those crappy mortgages to people who couldn't afford them in the first place. Takes a lot of nerve to be so blatantly greedy then act stuck on stupid when it backfires.