Hee, Nora. I totally just pimped ING to a friend of mine. How do I get a referral code? She'll have enough money to open an account when she gets paid in three weeks.
Once you get all logged in and stuff, go to the very bottom of the page, and there should be a graphic that says, "tell a friend!" and you click on that and it sends you to the page where you put in people's names and emails and stuff. It's very exciting!
Yes, I love the ING people and customer service too. We don't care too much about the bricks and mortar thing, but that's just us. Tom had an internet only checking account before we went to Wainwright, and while we were happy about supporting a local bank that works very hard to serve the community the online stuff at first was a bit rough and that was definitely a transisiton. It's upgraded some though, since then.
I know that I was so paralyzed with not knowing what I was doing with the IRA thing that I let it sit in my old employer's accounts for so many years, but dealing the ING was SO FREAKING EASY, even for me. Seriously, aside from ING-love and a quick consultation with the 401K guy who liaisons with our university (aggressive investing now, and safer bets closer to retirement, basically) I know nothing about this stuff and ING made it very easy to do online and over the phone.
(also, I realized that I had to divide the gains % over the number of years to get an accurate reading on the growth, so my IRA gain I was confuzzled about upthread was more like 8-9% which is fine and dandy by me.)
The 2-3 day lag is probably the only downside, but we actually like it because it makes the money just a LEETLE bit less accessible for our (OK my) spendy ways. This is just theoretical of course, because basically what happens is we use the credit card for emergencies or unexpected household or car expenses and then transfer the money to the checking account a few days before we plan on paying the credit card online. Once it hits the checking, then we make the payment.
So the lag has never really affected us negatively, we just learned to plan around it.
I didn't know the student loan interest tax deduction was only for the first 5 years of repayment! (cries) That means that either this year or next year I won't be able to use it!
OK I shut up now.
{{Gloomcookie}}