For anybody interest in the Advantage Account , this is what BOA email me:
Thank you for your inquiry dated 5/5/05 regarding the Advantage Checking Account.
The Advantage Checking account has a $25 monthly service charge. Please note that the monthly maintenance fee is waived for the initial 3 months. After the 3 months, this monthly service charge may be waived by maintaining a $25,000 combined balance in linked checking accounts, savings accounts, CDs, IRAs, credit cards, loans, lines of credit, mortgage accounts and investment accounts. daily balance in a checking account that is linked with a savings account, Money Market Savings account, or a CD or IRA account.
Upon your request via secured e-mail, we will be more than happy to upgrade your account level to Advantage.
If we may be of further assistance, please contact us again by e-mail.
Unless B of A has adopted a new set of criteria, to be applied
*only* to *new* Advantage customers, then the email you got is, at least, incomplete in its description of the criteria. I have had an Advantage account at B of A for some 7 years or so, and I can tell you that my balance requirements are not that high ... by at least $10,000; though I believe that there are different balance requirements for different combinations of accounts.
But I think the real bottom line is: TANSTAAFL.
You basically get what you pay for, but business is not obliged to make it easy for you to compare the costs of their benefits to the costs of their competetor's benefits. Still, there are those who are convinced that there is a free lunch out there just waiting for them, especially when focusing too narrowly on just one benefit.
Personally, I find that B of A has very good benefits, though I know that I also pay for those benefits. Uunfortunately billpay is not a benefit for me at this time. I am waiting until sufficient number of business offer e-billing, at which time I do expect I will begin utilizing billpay at B of A, or whoever my banker is at the time.
John, are you saying that you write (print) out all your own checks? How should the e-billing work that will allow you to convert to billpay? I'm curious. I write out less than one check/month, most of my regular payments are set up as billpay transactions, others bill automatically to my bank/credit card account. I like the convenience of billpay because my money is in transit for only 2 days when EFT is involved or 5 business days for paper checks. I get no hassles with stamps, envelopes and dropping mail off at a mailbox.
It's not a matter of "allowing" me to convert to billpay, but a matter of making it worthwhile to do so.
Currently most of my bills are paid by having the payee automatically take the money from my checking account for each payment (EFT): zero hassle for me, and the bills are all paid on time.
The only drawback I find is giving payees direct access to my bank account: I can legally deny them access when I wish, but that does not physically prevent them from accessing the account later. (One year after I stopped doing business with a satellite tv company - and had a letter from them acknowledging they no longer had legitimate access to my bank account, they accidentally took a month's payment from my checking account. They discovered their error and notified all those affected and put the money back within a couple of days, but it did prove that they never actually lose the ability to access the account).
The way I understand e-bills; they will fill in the missing link in the method I am now using. Because the payee never has access to my bank account, I have absolute control over withdrawals. But because the bills are presented in electronic form, I have no need to manually authorize/enter those whose amounts are not the same each time. I can give a general authorization to pay, visually verify that the amount is correct for each e-bill, then do nothing else, and the bill will be paid; electronically, accurately, and on time. If I disagree with the amount of the bill, I can refuse to authorize its payment. Essentially, this is the opposite of plain billpay, where if you want to pay those bills that are different each time, you must manually trigger the payment transaction to reflect the correct amount of the bill.
Thanks for providing that email. I called Wachovia and got the same answer for new customers. The rep told me that old customers could continue to use Quicken to "send" banking transactions to Wachovia and Wachovia would process them. However, she said that new customers would not be able use Quicken but must go online and use Wachovia's Billpay.
I asked her two or three times if that would eventually apply to old customers and she repeatdly said that it would not. So old customers can continue to use Quicken to set up banking transactions. I asked her what the reason for that was and she said it was because of "Systems" whatever that means.
My feeling now is that if they stop new customers from using Quicken to originate banking transactions, they will eventually cut the old customers off also. I guess what that means is that I would have to go to Wachovia Online to set up any banking transactions. When the transactions were completed, I assume that it would still be downloaded into Quicken.
Thanks for the insight. I like paying my bills each month. It is a reminder of what I am actually paying for my necessities/luxuries. When I use automatic withdrawals, I find it is easy to loose track of what I am actually paying each month. It is the out of sight, out of mind concept. Since I rarely change banks, I was trying to do my homework.
I don't mind paying for convenience if I have to. It just that banks are known for excessive fees if you don't pay attention. I was looking for a account just for paying bills and for transfering cash to online accounts that actually pays decent interest.
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