Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Switching from ING Direct to Capital One Online Savings Account: Part 1

Yesterday, I finally decided to leave ING Direct after six years and was trying to decide where to open up a replacement account. I was looking for a replacement with consistently high rates that also allowed me to use Direct Connect with Quicken so that I could update Quicken with one-click, instead of having to log in to a bank's website and downloading a file manually.

I was leaning towards Capital One's Online Savings Account, which is currently yielding 3.66% if you are a Costco member and deposit more than $10,000 with them. However, I couldn't determine whether they supported Direct Connect. A call to their customer service department didn't help--they were very courteous and seemed to know what I was asking, but they said they didn't know the answer and would transfer me to their tech support department. I gave up after waiting on hold for more than 10 minutes.

Fortunately, I found a post on one of my favorite blogs, Consumerism Commentary, that listed recent rates for some popular high yield accounts, along with some notes on what Quicken formats some banks supported. I found that Capital One Online Savings is supposed to support the Direct Connect feature that I was looking for. I've linked the the spreadsheet at the bottom of this post.

I began the process of opening a new Capital One Online Savings account today. Part of the process involves answering some questions based on data that they've apparently pulled from a credit report, such as the name of your mortgage lender or a previous street address. Next, since I wanted to fund the account with the money that was in my ING Direct account, I had to put in ING Direct's routing number and my account number. Capital One will put a couple of test deposits into the ING Direct account. Once I verify the amounts, Capital One will link to the ING Direct account and pull the requested amount into my new account. At least that's what's supposed to happen. I'll keep you posted on the progress and let you know if it goes through as smoothly as described. For some reason, I expect there to be some snags, but so far so good.

3 comments:

» Moving from ING Direct to Capital One Online Savings: Part 2 Getting To Enough: A personal finance blog on what it means to have enough money and the best way to get there. said...

[...] there, I think I still would have chosen Capital One. This is partly because their rate history, as shown in the spreadsheet in my previous post, is still pretty good. I try to balance chasing the highest rate with the trouble and risks [...]

180th Carnival of Personal Finance said...

[...] from Getting To Enough documents “Switching from ING Direct to Capital One“.  He’s a better man than me, I let laziness dictate my staying with BofA and HSBC [...]

180th Carnival of Personal Finance said...

[...] from Getting To Enough documents “Switching from ING Direct to Capital One“.  He’s a better man than me, I let laziness dictate my staying with BofA and HSBC [...]