ING Direct, E-Trade holds

I spoke with someone at E-Trade customer service today to see why my initial deposit was not yet available. Turns out the initial deposit takes 9 business days before it becomes available. Other deposits transferred from my external account take 5 business days.

Now, there are ways I can transfer money in that will make it available the same day or the next day, direct deposit being one of them, a deposit at a branch office being another. But we don’t have a branch office in Tennessee and I don’t see why I would do a direct deposit into that account. If I do an electronic wire I think it will go in the next day, but I think I have to pay for that.

Something else I learned: I may have been too hasty blaming ING Direct for the delay in getting the money into my Bank of America account. E-Trade told me that if I transfer funds before 3pm (I’m assuming EST), the money will leave my account that same day. But my other bank’s policy on holding deposits will still apply. Which means my Bank of America account was probably the hold up the whole time.

For now, I suppose, I will maintain my E-Trade account, at least until my initial deposit clears and I can use some of it to erase the deficit in my defunct Roth IRA and close that account. I may just keep it in E-Trade after that because of the higher APY.

Updated savings numbers — explanation

In the right column there, you can see that the new amount in my savings account is 32.17. When I switched from ING Direct to E-Trade for my savings account, I had $7 and some change in the account. When I closed the account, they added to that the interest I had earned to that point in the month. This gave me a total of $7.17.

I wouldn’t be able to access that money for a few days once I closed the account, and I wanted to start the new savings account immediately, so I just transferred $25 into my E-Trade savings account. Once the $7.17 came into my checking account, I moved it into the E-Trade account.

So now we start trying to self-deprive again with a balance of $32.17. I’ve decided just to move the money into my Roth IRA every time I get over $50 in the account, so it won’t be long now before I invest again. If I just keep this up in little chunks like this I think it will really start to snowball.

Goodbye ING Direct, hello E-Trade

Well, I just closed my ING Direct Savings account and transferred the little that was left into my checking account, so I can transfer it to my new E-Trade savings account when it’s officially open (tomorrow). So why did I close my ING Direct account?

Well, I like ING Direct, but I had one major problem with them. When I want to transfer money from it to my checking account, it takes at least 3 days to actually appear in my account. Also, once I transfer money into my ING Direct account, I can’t withdraw it for 7-10 days.

I wanted to use this account to have a savings built up but also as a small emergency fund, but this was impossible to do given the delays in transferring. E-Trade, with whom I already had an account, apparently has either no delay or a very slight (one day) delay. Besides that, the APY for ING Direct was at 4.5% while E-Trade is at 5.05%.

Just basically a moving of money from one place to another, but I thought I’d mention it to you.

Something funny and related: When you close your ING account online, they want to know why. One of the few options they gave was “Transfers took too long”. They know it’s a problem but don’t do anything about it….at least not yet they don’t.

New contribution to Roth IRA

Well, I went ahead and transferred $50 from my ING Direct savings account into my Roth IRA. I got a quarterly dividend payment recently too, of about $3.00 and some change. Hey, it’s better than nothing!

I feel like ever since I started this blog and started trying to get my financial house in order, I haven’t been as strict with it as I could. I also felt like I was making such little steps that it was like trying to fill up a swimming pool with an eyedropper.

But my little $20 a pay period contributions to my 401-k and the company’s matching of that $20 is adding up and will eventually be a big help. The Roth is doing well too, for just starting out. I am starting to see a little momentum building and starting to feel a little better about things.

I’m also about to start working on my father-in-law’s Web site, so I’ll get some extra cash for that. I’ve had other folks interested in my doing Web work for them on the side, but that always falls through. I have one other person/company I may be doing some work for as well. I’m hoping to get some more income flowing soon.

The whole Europe trip did, however, kind of throw a wrench in our works. We have credit card debt again, much more than I would like, but it’s a reasonable amount and something we can easily pay off in a short time. In other words, we used our credit cards the way they should be used: for emergencies and with the intent of paying them off ASAP.

So things may be looking up. Once the cards are paid off again I can see about doing a money market account and some CD laddering. I’m really hoping to snowball my modest bit of savings documented on this site into a huge amount of investments/savings vehicles.

Back from Europe and still thinking about money

Well, I have returned from Europe a good bit poorer, but mostly just from buying meals. We managed to keep our spending under control for the most part, not feeling the need to buy a bunch of junk to further clutter our house. We did take the opportunity to buy gifts for folks because, come on, how often can you give someone a birthday/christmas/other gift and say, “I picked this up in Nice, France”?

Anyway, because we would be in Europe we opened a credit card for the trip and did end up putting things on the credit card. Not something I wanted whatsoever but it ended up being somewhat necessary. Fortunately the bulk of it will be paid off by Friday as I’ll get paid and my wife will be getting her paycheck for the trip soon (yes, she actually got to go for free AND got paid for it).

My 401-k and Roth are doing ok….they have their ups and downs. I did hear good news today though: apparently the company is increasing how much money they’ll match for your 401-k. For me this will mean an extra $120 a year they will put into my 401-k. Nothing like free money!

I hope to get into more depriving and investing soon, including possibly starting CDs/CD laddering and opening a money market account, so look for more frequent posts soon.