Earlier this year I moved a sizeable amount of my cash (low five figures at the time) from Guaranty Bank to Broadway Bank. BankRate was looking slim for Guaranty at the time, and I didn’t want to be caught trying to collect FDIC insurance on my own. Looks like I made the right decision.
A couple of weeks ago Guaranty Bank failed. It wasn’t the only bank failure on that Friday (the 21st of August), but it was the largest. Guaranty’s demise was the second largest bank failure of the year, next to Colonial Bank in Alabama.
What’s surprising to me is that, so far, absolutely nothing has changed for me, two weeks into the switchover to ownership by the Spanish BBVA group. My debit card still works, complete with ATM fee rebates. I’m pretty sure I can still write checks, provided I have money in my account (I pretty much won’t after my monthly credit card payment goes through, thanks to a rather large cash-out a few days ago at a Wal-Mart ATM). Online banking still works with my old username, password and security questions. Heck, I might even keep my (rather awesome) grandfathered free checking plan: a paltry amount of interest on top of no-fee ATM withdrawals, 5¢ rebate on debit-as-credit transactions, plus a bunch of free checks.
On the other hand, I’ll trust the (significantly) more conservative Broadway Bank with any big money that I might earn. When you’ve got $2 billion in assets in a small, hyper-regional bank, you’re a pretty solid entity. When you neither offer awesome free-checking features nor buy into subprime lending, you’re bound to stick around. To my knowledge Broadway is the only bank local to me to get a sterling five-star BankRate rating; even BBVA is three stars (Guaranty was two when I moved my money out).
Sure, I’ll keep a few hundred dollars in Guar…er…BBVA for the free ATM withdrawals and such, but I’m trusting my main money from here on out to a local entity who doesn”t loan out their money willy-nilly, even though my newly preferred bank has downright crappy account features, uses my SSN as my online banking username and technically hasn’t kept my dollars and cents intact better than the FDIC did with Guaranty.
#1 by winston on January 30, 2010 - 11:19 pm
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Yeah I’m with them also. I’ve usually got less than a thousand in my account so I don’t have any of the worries you do, but the $300 minimum you have to have in the account annoys me. If I take out that $300 in say 6 years it won’t mean as much as it does now at 16.. wish I could just pay them $25 or so upfront and let it go as low as I like.