The week when Wamu went into auction, I was absolutely in a panick mode because I dont know what to expect. The thing is we always have our wamu account to pay all of our major bills. Since we charge most of the bills with our credit card, so it wont be that bad because as long as we paid it off before accrued interest.
Our main concern is the payment for the rent. We usually deposit the money a week before, and the fund will be there when we make the rent payment. During that week, rumored that we wont be able to access wamu for a day up 90 days, does freak me out a little because I already deposit the rent money earlier.
We do have other saving account but most of our saving at that time was in wamu. The ease of transferring between saving and checking which is also instant transfer, and with their high 4% interest rate for saving at that time, make us one of their loyal customer. I know that the fact that the increasing saving rate is one of the major “ding” that bank is in trouble because they need our deposit. But as long as you stayed below FDIC limit, you will be safe.
The problem is, since all of our fund is inside wamu, so when wamu went under, there’s always a chance that we wont be able to access our fund up to 90 days. (im glad we dont have to face this issue, because the tarnsition is pretty smooth, with no interruption).
Since then, we move some of our fund to multiple saving account. We use ING direct, DollarSavingDirects (part of Emigrant Bank ). We have been using ING for over a year. We have our ING as our vacation/toys/annual bills fund. Right now every account has almost equal amount. Suppose one of those bank fails, I will always have 2 more banks to access our saving in case of emergency.
We used to live paychek from paycheck 2 years ago….. and I dont like the insecure feelings…because we are like one paycheck away to not able to pay our bills….
But as much as I love to save up during rainy days, I always believe that we do need to make a little “splurge” on ourselves. That explains the vacation fund. But of course, if one of us lose our job, we can easily transfrom that into emergency fund. But so far we have dont have to touch those and it will remain as vacation fund which we always take end of the year or beginning of the year for 2-3 days.
