101–110 of 282 posts
I used to have a side gig as the CFO for a not-for-profit (an unpaid volunteer). Anyway, this organization was over 125 years old, associated with a larger organization 80 years older than that, and had the same primary bank for 70 years ... Anyway, my treasurer, who was very smart, insisted we keep enough cash to run for 3 months in a secondary bank. Just in case we were locked out of our primary bank.
Yeah no one tells you when you start your business that your own bank is preying on you.
Similar experience: Citibank Retirement. I had about $80,000 in IRA/CD's. I'd created & contributed to them over a period of 35 years. Last year, it's time to retire, and Citibank won't give me half the money. It seems that some CD's are for "Cliff Stoll" and some for "Clifford Stoll". Citibank Retirement demanded a "Marriage Certificate, Divorce Decree, or Court Order" to demonstrate that "Cliff Stoll" is the same p…
Infuriating. That kind of thing is what makes me wish I could not have to ever deal with a bank ever again.
At least I know never to do business with Citi.
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Congrats on the retiring! Are you still doing the hats & bottles or did you retire from that too?
Thanks D'moy! I'm still having fun with Klein bottles and other topological manifolds. Toying with immersions of the projective plane and several knot embeddings. At the moment, retirement mainly means "start taking out required minimum distributions". All the same, I wonder: How do you retire from a marginally profitable nano-business built upon glass mathematical shapes? How'd I ever reach 74 years old?
Another story about a startup and chase, from the person who founded hashicorp, it's a fun read: https://mitchellh.com/writing/my-startup-banking-story (edited since at first I remembered it being more negative about chase in particular -- but it's really just funny!)
Did you read to the end? > I want to make it clear that Chase could've been an excellent banking partner. I never gave them the chance. I never told them what my business does or what I'd use the money for. I never talked to anyone (besides saying what I needed to get off the phone). This story isn't a cautionary tale about Chase, it is rather recounting my naivete as a young, first-time startup founder.
I know that it's an extra expense, but shouldn't you get a lawyer involved first thing?
Lawyer would be great but it may be that you have agreed to a contract which says you cannot sue them, only arbitration.
Diversifying in many cases won't help you. If a bank suspects fraud, they can tell other banks about their suspicion, which will cause all banks to freeze your accounts and none will be able to tell you why.
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It's definitely exacerbated by being a big bank though. If I have a problem with my local bank, I can literally walk into the branch and probably just talk to a VP about it straight-away if needed.
This is even more true at a local credit union. Add in the co-op network of credit unions, where you can go to any branch of any of the member unions (50k+ branches last time I checked, but it's been awhile) and it's hard for me to understand why people bother with these big banks.
Since we can't vet a bank's IT infrastructure, having multiple bank accounts seems like the only way to guard against certain risks.
[1] https://www.northbaybusinessjournal.com/article/industrynews...
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Who said you have to deal with a bank? That's not written into law, is it? Try a credit union if you want to avoid banks.
Is the experience that different? I've never tried one, but I assumed the level of bureaucracy must be similar in order to defend against fraud and fulfill regulatory requirements.
This is a medium sized credit union, with a dozen or so branches.