Give Me Back My Five Bucks

OMG. I bounced a cheque for the first time today, which resulted in a $35 NSF fee.

And it was my rent cheque that I bounced. Yikes!

I bought those baseball tickets through PayPal, and it came out of my chequing account ... and b/c I knew I didn't have enough $$ in my chequing account to pay for both my rent and the tickets, I transferred $50 from my Travel Fund into my account. Well, it turns out the PayPal transaction AND the rent cheque both came out of my account mere HOURS before the $50 cleared ... and I ended up being short by $0.05. Whoops.

So anyway, I called PC Financial, and they waived the $35 NSF fee for me. And now I will have to write a new cheque out to my landlord, who probably thinks I'm a huge bum b/c I even gave him that rent cheque a day late.

I'm such an idiot.

I've had a few questions about how I manage my money, and how I'm partitioning my funds. Basically, for every sidebar listed, I have a separate savings account. I also have a chequing account, which holds anywhere from $10-$600 at any given time. That money is always fluctuating, so I don't bother listing it on the sidebar, or in my NetworthIQ.

• Emergency Fund - PC Financial Interest Plus Savings Account
• Condo Down Payment - PC Financial Interest Plus Savings Account
  
• Travel Fund - ING Direct Savings Account
• Gift Fund - PC Financial Interest First Savings Account
• Retirement Portfolio - TD Canada Trust e-Funds
  

I like having separate accounts b/c it makes it way less confusing for me to try to partition pooled money. Plus, it's not like it costs anything to have multiple savings accounts, so why not?! Also, I manage all of these accounts through Quicken.

I really love Quicken because I can get as detailed as I want to get with my money. I like how it will graph out my progress, remind me of upcoming bills and transactions, show me my net worth, and help me maintain my budget.

Before I used Quicken, I was tracking all of my spending through a really complicated Excel spreadsheet that I created. Once I switched to Quicken, managing my personal finance became FUN. Seriously. And it was way more motivating to see all of my money and progress listed in a real, professional program. As opposed to Excel, which is pretty ghetto compared to Quicken. Sometimes, I would just explore Quicken for hours, figuring out my debt totals, creating debt reduction strategies, playing around with a budget, and scheduling transactions. It's awesome!

Anyway, if any of you have any more questions about how I'm managing my money, please let me know. :)

Do you know what makes me angry? Holds on cheques I deposit into my bank account through the ATM machine. I can understand personal cheques - the bank wants to make sure the funds have cleared before I have access to the money, I get it. But government cheques? Come on.

I called PC Financial, and they said that for all cheques over $1k, there is a one-week hold on them, and I only have access to $1k of the money. So right now, I have about $3.5k sitting in limbo that I don't have access to until Friday. Not that I need the money, I just want to get it the heck out of my chequing account and into my RRSPs where they belong.

With TD Canada Trust, if I deposited my cheque through a teller, I had immediate access to all of the money, regardless if it was a personal or a government cheque. But not with their ATM either. What's the difference? It's not like the teller can immediately tell whether the cheque is going to clear or not ... so why don't I get that same luxury when I use the ATM machine to deposit money? Maybe I could understand a 24-48 hrs. hold so they can sort through all the customer deposits through the ATM, but anything longer than that just doesn't make sense.

My mom said that when she deposits cheques into her RBC account through the ATM, she gets immediate access to the entire amount. Maybe it has something to do with my banking history, or tenure, or something like that. But I had that TD chequing account for 23 years before I told them to shove it last summer (I didn't actually tell them to 'shove it'), so I'm not really sure.

Anger.

Alright, I'm back. After calling TD, getting completely aggravated, then going and talking to my boss about something unrelated, I am now slightly less angry. But still angry.

When I called TD, I spoke with a young man who seemed pleasant enough, but his accent was so thick I had a really hard time understanding what he was saying. Anyway, he told me I couldn't switch to the e-fund because it didn't fit my investor portfolio (which I already knew), but he made it seem as if I just wasn't going to be allowed to switch. When I persisted, he said he would have to go through the entire client questionnaire again to make sure I'm investing properly. This made me very annoyed, because 1) I have already been asked the questionnaire before, and 2) you can answer the entire thing online, which I had already done. Plus, with his thick accent, it was painfully slow.

After the questionnaire, in which I answered all the questions the same as I had when I set the account up, he suggested I was best-suited for the Balanced Growth Portfolio. Well, duh. He then concluded I should be kept in that same fund, and asked if there was anything else he could do for me today. The nerve!

I again pressed him, and said that I really want to be in the e-fund, and he was very reluctant to switch me over. He even suggested only investing 65% of my money, and keeping the rest in the Balanced Growth fund. I'm not sure why, though. Maybe it was because they make a killing off anyone who stays in that fund because of the high MER, or maybe he knows something I don't know, and I stand to lose a lot of money. Who knows. At any rate, I'm all switched up now and in the right fund.

Also, I upped my contribution into the e-fund to $1,000/month ($500 bi-weekly). I will try to bump it up again by another $500, but I may invest in something different. We'll see. I'm getting nervous about investing so much. Before it was okay because I was only dumping in tiny amounts. $1,000/month is not a tiny amount. At least not to me!

A few days ago, I blogged about how I was so excited to switch my non-registered mutual funds account from the TD Balanced Growth Fund, over to the Canadian Index e-Fund. Well, today I got an e-mail saying my transaction request was not processed. Wait, WHAT!?

Order # XXXXXX-XXXX-XXXXX

Dear Investor,

[...] We have not fulfilled your request because it may not be suited to your current investor profile. We have based this assessment on the information you provided us regarding your personal circumstances, investment knowledge, objectives, time horizon and risk tolerance. Not only do we want to help you make the best investment decisions, we are required to assess the suitability of all mutual fund
account transactions.

Please contact a TD Investment Services Mutual Funds Representative to review and update the information we have regarding your Investor Profile.

Thank you,

TD Investment Services Inc.

I thought the whole point of having an e-fund was so that I could take over my own account, and make all the decisions I wanted to make over the internet. I wanted to eliminate having to actually talk to an advisor, but apparently now I'm going to have to. I guess I understand the need for them to make sure I'm not investing in something completely ridiculous, but still. To just send me an e-mail telling me they aren't processing my request seems silly. The least they could have done was call me and tell me they aren't doing what I want them to do, instead of making me call them and wait on hold while I'm at work (I've never once gotten through without being put on hold).

Now I'm going to have to talk to one of their advisors, and I don't want to have to explain to the reasoning behind why I'm switching. I also don't want them to sucker me into another fund when that's the one I want. ARGG. And I hate how they want to update my investor portfolio. Well, no kidding the new mutual fund I picked isn't suited to my investor portfolio, because the only investor portfolio I filled out was for my RRSPs. This account I opened myself. And I don't want them messing around with my RRSP investor portfolio either.

I am really disliking TD right now, and they'd better not pull this crap on me every time I make a change to my portfolio.

... but only if you're Canadian. And have a PC Financial Mastercard.

Maybe I've been out of the loop for a while, or maybe I didn't research hard enough, but I just found out that through my PC Financial Mastercard, they are offering a 30-day trial called Credit Alert where I can view my credit score & report (and have my credit files monitored every business days at both Equifax and Trans Union). After the trial, it's $14.99/month ... so as long as I remember to cancel my subscription to it before the 30 days are up, it looks like I'd be good to go!

I know that some of my PF friends in the U.S. were talking about a 30-day trial membership to monitor their scores, so I'm really glad Canadians have the opportunity to do the same as well.

I think I'm going to try this out in the fall, because I just recently checked my credit score. And while I'm dying to know what it is now, I doubt it's changed all that much in the course of 3 months. Plus, it's not like I'm going to need to start really monitoring my credit score for at least another year. Just as long as I pay all my bills on time, and don't open/close any accounts, my number should only go up from here.

I know this kinda sounds like a sponsored post, but it's not. I just really really like PC Financial, and all of the services they have to offer. I always recommend that people switch from their banks over to PC for free unlimited transactions with their chequing accounts, free cheques, as well as a 4% interest rate on their Interest Plus savings account. I just wish their GIC rates were comparable to those of Outlook Financial ... and I also wish they had a referral program like ING does, so I can make some $$ for all the free advertising I'm giving them ... but no bank is perfect, I guess. :)

So what are you waiting for? Go switch!

Last week when I went to close my TD accounts, I asked the woman to calculate how much I would have to pay for my fees that month. She told me a number, and I wrote a cheque out to her in that amount. Well, it turns out she was 6 cents off, and I ended up owing money. Now there's no way I was going all the way downtown to the bank just to write a crappy cheque for 6 cents, so luckily when I called the customer service line, the man just credited my account the money. I guess TD isn't that bad after all.

I finally got to read Shopaholic & Baby yesterday. I've had that book on hold at the library for months! Anyway, I read it in one sitting, and it was okay. I don't think it had the charm of the other books, but it was still a good read. Venetia was such a two-faced bitch, and I love how Suze just kept referring to her as a cow, as if that's the best insult she could think of. NIUiceprincess, have you finished reading it yet?

Oh, and also I was told I came in second for that job I interviewed for last week. They want to keep my resume on file because they're pretty sure another job is going to be opening up with them in the next 6 months or so. I'm even surprised I came in second considering how much I bombed the interview! Oh well. In a way, I'm kinda glad I didn't get the job because it was a 2 year contract position ... because now I can concentrate on getting a permanent job.

Anyway, it's off to go do some fund raising work with my field hockey team! Hope everyone's having a fabulous weekend!

A recent reader made this comment:

ps said...
If you have already closed your TD chequing account, then well, end of story. If you haven't, then don't, if you possibly can. The reason is that since you have had the TD account for so long, it is reflected in your credit score. If you close down your older financial association, you might hurt your credit score or so I've heard. You can find a lot more info on bankrate.com

Is this true? I thought the only way a chequing account would impact my credit negatively is if I had a bunch of overdraft on the account, or if I had bounced a cheque ... at least that's what I've been reading after Googling the heck out of it before I came to post on my blog. But after reading the comment, now I'm scared that I've closed an account that I've had open for over 20 years. Because anyone can open a chequing account, right? My mom opened it for me when I was just a baby.

It's not like I can do anything about it now since the account is definitely closed, but for future reference, I should probably know for certain what the answer is.

Ugg, this is getting so frustrating. At home, the new layout looked great in Firefox, but now that I'm at work and viewing it through IE, it looks like crap on a stick. Most of the text looks smushed, and isn't going the full width of the sidebar ... but some things (like my progress bars) do utilize the full width. I'm not sure what's wrong, and I don't want to fiddle around with the layout because it looks perfect in Firefox. At least, from what I can remember, it looked perfect. And I haven't even tested it in Safari yet. Sigh. At least I got the whole "Published on" date stuff corrected ... even though I had to get rid of the Time Stamp, and just go with a Date Stamp. But no one really cares what time of the day I posted at anyway.

*** EDIT 11:15am -- The sidebar text isn't smushed anymore! Hoorah!!! Now it looks normal in IE ... but I did have to tweak two things in the code to get it to work. Does it look okay in Firefox still? I guess I'll have to check it out when I get home this afternoon, unless any of you are using FF to view this site.

In PF news, my first PPP post got approved, so all I have to do now is wait for PayPal to confirm the new chequing account I added to my profile. I originally had my chequing and savings accounts with TD Canada Trust, along with both my registered and non-registered mutual fund accounts, a Line of Credit, and a Visa card. But last year, I discovered the wonders of no-fee/unlimited transaction banking from PC Financial (plus high interest rates on their savings accounts!), so I opened up a chequing/savings account with them, and had my pay cheques deposited at PC Financial instead.

I've kept my TD Canada Trust chequing account opened (and have been paying $3.95 in monthly fees) so I could finish paying off my LOC and my student loans ... but now that I'm done, why should I pay $3.95 a month for 20 transactions, when I can get unlimited transactions for free?! So I went into TD last week to close my chequing/savings account, and they tried to get me to come back to TD by offering me a free iPod (depending on what you did, you could get a shuffle, nano or video).

I didn't really get any more information passed that. I was sure I would have come out on top if I had decided to re-open my accounts with them, pay the $3.95 monthly fee and whatever else I had to do, get the free iPod and sell it, and then close the accounts again as soon as the required time passed ... but that just seemed like way too much effort. And I'm glad I didn't take the offer, because Canadian Capitalist just wrote a post about what the stipulations are to get the iPod video, and you have to sign up for a Visa with a $99 annual fee! The nano offer is a bit better, but it requires transferring money, opening up $5,000 worth of GICs, and setting up pre-authorized debit payments. It doesn't seem worth it for the low interest rates they offer. Besides, I already own an iPod video.

So thanks, but no thanks, TD.