Things have been quite busy around here! My wife and I are still in the process of starting our new business, which I hope to reveal and discuss the details of within a week (which is when we hope to receive our first shipment of products).

In the meantime, I thought I would mention our decision to go nearly completely to internet banking for all of our finances. Currently, we have two checking and a savings account at Citizens Bank, a decent sized bank in New England. Overall, I don’t really have any complaints about them. The only actual problem I had was with duplicate Quicken transaction downloads, which in actuality is a severe hindrance for keeping accurate records in Quicken. It seems as though Citizens Bank posts ATM transactions twice to their online banking, as Quicken detects two different entries. Besides that issue though, we also aren’t completely happy with the ATM’s we live near. Also, our savings account there is useless due to its paltry interest rate.

Since we needed to open a new account for our business anyway, we decided to take this opportunity to move all of our accounts. The biggest benefit to this change is that we will have every account (sans credit cards and brokerages) at the same location - HSBC Direct. That will include:

• My personal checking
• Wife’s personal checking
• Business checking
• Emergency savings
• Long-term savings

All accounts will be joint. We did decide to maintain separate checking accounts though, as we still don’t feel comfortable with combining our purchases onto one account – though we do trust each other’s spending habits.

So far, the process of opening the account at HSBC Direct has been very positive. I called with a half-dozen questions and had them immediately answered by a representative who picked up my call immediately. The online account opening process was straightforward, and the ability to save the application definitely helped.

The only oddity was when my wife was asked to fax or email a document confirming her address. We’re not sure why this happened, but after emailing this document this morning I received confirmation that our application had been approved only two hours later!. Usually this “processing” tends to take several business days, so I was very impressed to receive a response so quickly.

So why did we choose HSBC Direct?

• Multiple online checking accounts!. Originally I was planning to open these accounts at ING, but to my dismay I found out you can only have one Electric Orange checking per overall account. Thus, we would not have been able to consolidate all of our finances.
• 3 reimbursed ATM transactions per month, at any ATM. This is a really big benefit. Not having to worry about what network your ATM is in will be a great freedom. As long as the 3 transactions are per specific account, then we shouldn’t have a problem as I rarely use the ATM more than 3 times a month.
• Decent interest rates on checking and savings. The checking is 2.5% interest, which is lower than, say, ING, but higher than the 0% we get now. Also, we don’t tend to leave that much in our checking anyway, as we funnel extra money into savings. The savings gets 5.05%, which is good enough for us.