Not that anyone really cares:

I decided to go with a local credit union I'm a member of. The lack of OFX access for ING was kind of a deal-killer for me, especially since charging for it was the straw that made me leave Wachovia.

Anyway, I've been using the credit union for a while now. I thought I'd let you know my experiences (not that it's likely that anyone else here can be a member of the North Carolina State Employees' Credit Union), at least so you might know what to look for.

First off, I closed my accounts with Wachovia, which was a huge pain. They couldn't seem to figure out the final amount I needed to pay to close the account (during the transition, I screwed up, forgot about an automatic payment, and accidentally overdrew the Wachovia account) and I ended up having to go back to the bank several times to get it cleared up. Then my HR department failed to update my direct deposit in time, which I knew they'd due, despite the fact that I gave them nearly two weeks' notice. I figured that the worst case would be that Wachovia would reject the deposit and they'd send me a paper check. As it turned out, Wachovia decided to accept the deposit, despite the account being closed, so I once again had to go to the bank, get a check from them and courier it over to my new bank by hand. (Of course, my HR department also chose this pay period to forget to send my pay stub, so it took me over a day before I realized what had happened, since I was expecting to get an actual check instead of a stub.) So, in summary, Wachovia sucks as much in closing an account as they do in holding an account.

When I opened the new account, I decided to not get any checks, as I figured that I could use BillPay for virtually everything that I would have used checks for, and print checks out myself for anything that that wouldn't work for. Well, as it turns out, it's not as easy to print your own checks as I had hoped, but it largely hasn't been an issue.

NCSECU has OFX access, which is great. The way they update the transactions is a little odd, though. It seems to get updated only once a day, whereas I seem to recally Wachovia updating constantly. Not really a huge deal, but different. In addition, Wachovia allowed you to see pending but not posted transactions, whereas the SECU just shows you a dollar summary. Again, not a huge deal (basically it just means the same thing as above: just wait a day), but not as nice as Wachovia.

I hadn't used Wachovia's BillPay feature very extensively, but the SECU's seems just as nice. ISTR that Wachovia would actually get notifications from some of the payees as to how much was owed, but honestly, it was only for a few, it was easy to get out of sync if you didn't pay through BillPay, and it just cluttered up the screen. I kind of prefer the lack of that feature.

I'd halfway forgotten that I had a Wachovia credit card. Apparently the card's backend was handled by FIA, nee MBNA, which was purchased by Bank of America. At some point soon after I moved banks, Wachovia decided to take over the backend themselves. As part of that takeover, they decided that there would be no online access unless you had a Wachovia deposit account. So now I had no good way to pay my bill except via BillPay, which I'd been using anyway. So I used it again. And it was rejected. So I called both banks to figure out why. I never got a straight answer, but it's probably because the SECU sent the payment to BoA, who no longer dealt with the account. They suggested that I set up a new BillPay payee to send a physical check, which I did, and then didn't think about it for a week or so. Turns out that the SECU decided to convert that transaction to an electronic transaction, which, unsurprisingly, was rejected. I had a stern talking-to with them, but ended up having to once again courier cashier's checks between banks. Fortunately, I was paying the account off, so I don't have to deal with that again. That's really the only issue I've had with the new bank. Everything else, other BillPays included, seems to be working great.

With all of this change, I decided to switch accounting programs, though, and bought Moneydance. It's $30, which is the same price as Quicken Basic (I don't feel like finding out what's different between all 37 versions of Quicken at the moment), and $10 cheaper than MS Money. And it's written for Windows, MacOSX, and Linux. (In reality, it's a Java app, so it ought to run anywhere.) I was far from a Quicken power user, but, so far, I really like Moneydance. It supports OFX (that is, online transactions) and BillPay directly from the application. Both, obviously, require support from your bank. SECU doesn't support BillPay from the application, which is too bad. The reason I bring it up is because someone (Dan, maybe?) expressed a rhetorical question as to its capabilities, which I would be happy to help answer. It does have a free trial, but you can only enter something like 10 transactions, which makes it kind of hard to test. If you have any inclination towards getting it but have been on the fence, I have nothing bad to say about it. (Which is not to say that it's totally bug free, but I've not seen anything bad, other than a consistent crash that had to do with a Java/video-card-driver issue that was fixed via a Java tweak.) If anyone would like me to try anything or give a specific feature review, let me know.

Phew. That was long-winded for something that no one cares about.