Bank Change

With the advent of yet another Financial Peace University class Shawn & I have decided to make some changes in our financial management journey. We changed banks.

This was a decision we had pondered many times. We couldn't wrap our heads around the potential loss of $20-$40 of PC points every month. Our new FREE checking account gives 0 points every month and charges $28.50 for every book of checks we order!

We don't write a lot of checks and we will be writing even less of them now but even without the cost of every check order, we are potentially losing $240-$480 a year in groceries alone. Yikes! Why did we deliberately do this?


We had two reasons:

1) In following Dave Ramsey's zero-balanced budget, we had difficulty making our bank machine withdrawals line up with our exact needs because of the limitation to increments of $50's or $20's. If we only needed to withdraw $136.71, we had to round it up to $140, get change, and deposit back the difference. Crazy. You know, you're not supposed to put change in those bank machines but Shawn insisted that the PC people said it was okay.

Not to mention that our children were constantly begging for their chore commissions and it was a chore for us to get the change to pay them exactly what they had earned.

Now we can calculate to the penny what we need to withdraw and get the exact bills & coin we need from a real bank teller. How exciting!

2) The Windsor Family Credit Union offers a Global MasterCard that is attached to our checking account so that we can't spend more than we actually have. It is much like a debit card except you can use it wherever credit cards are expected. Online purchases, hotel reservations, and other similar transactions can be conducted but you are not using someone else's money.

We had retained our PC MasterCard for this purpose and we were paying the balance every month so we weren't accumulating debt, but something about knowing you are going to earn PC points for your purchases and that you can put off the payment until the next pay period just doesn't work for us.

So we are hoping that the end result of this change will more than justify the loss of those free groceries. This kind of goes with Dave's "Blowing Up the Log Jam" theory that I blogged about earlier. Lose a little, gain a lot.

We have frozen our old accounts with PC for six months to see if our banking experiment works for us. If we have one of those, "What have we done?" moments then we could switch things back to the way they were.

We are a little leery about some of the limitations of our new bank. We're not used to dealing with people we can see and who can see us. We're uncomfortable with being given access to our accounts without having to list secret passwords and recite our transaction history for the past couple weeks without asking each other out loud. (I'm being facetious here) As frustrating as banking with PC Financial was at times, they were a phone call away long past traditional banking hours. There was more than one time where that service was valuable to us. Now, we are going to need to think about our large purchases ahead of time...wait a minute...maybe that was what Dave Ramsey was aiming for!