Money matters and that kind of thing
So it has been more than two months since we moved into our new condo, and finally as of last night I managed to get set up to pay the condo fee.
This seemed a lot more complicated than it needed to be. To tell the end of the story first, the condo association (whose members are the owners of the two units in the building) has a joint checking account, which was owned by the two women who originally converted the house to condos in 2005. We needed to remove the previous owner -- the woman from whom I bought my condo -- and add me. But it took all this time to a) figure that out and b) do it!
When we first moved in, I asked the other owner, Judy, how to pay the monthly condo fee. She gave me the account number and said "you just link it to your bank account and make the transfers online." The account was with ING Direct, an online bank, and Judy suggested that I might find it easiest to open a small savings account with ING for this purpose. A quick bit of research showed that this was correct, because a transfer from my checking account at Eastern Bank to the ING account wasn't going to be simple.
So I went to the ING website and tried to open a new checking account. This was complicated by the fact that I used to be an ING customer, something like 7-8 years ago, and their system still had me in it with a customer number and a bunch of security questions, which it wanted me to answer in order to get in. Of course, some of those questions were things I chose way back when, and some of them gave me trouble now -- like the name of the street my office was on. Which office was I working at back then? How am I supposed to remember that kind of thing? I ended up calling customer support, and a guy on the phone helped me get access to the account. I explained what I wanted to do, and he said "oh sure, you want to open a savings account for that," so he walked me through opening a savings account and transferring some money from my Eastern Bank account. The transfer takes 10 business days when it's a new account, so insert some lengthy hold music here. ;)
Then I couldn't figure out how to link the condo account to my account. Somewhere in this time period, ING Direct got bought out and became "CapitalOne360" so the website changed, but all the data and functions were the same. I called customer support again and was told "oh but you can't do that with a savings account, you need to have a checking account." So I sighed and rolled my eyes and opened a checking account. One benefit of using the online bank is that opening a new account is super easy, so at least there's that.
But then it STILL wasn't working. I called customer support for the third time. This time they were no help at all. (I'm eliding over a lot of the details here because, honestly, who gives a crap?) The end result was that Judy and I needed to sit down together with our computers and see what each other was seeing. So we did that, and finally had the "aha" moment where we realized that the condo account was set up as a joint checking account and still had the person who sold the condo to me, Erica, listed as the primary owner. Judy clicked the option to remove Erica as an owner on the account, which sent an email to Erica asking her to confirm. So we had to wait a couple more days for her to do that. Then Judy tried to add me as a joint owner, which -- it took us another while to figure out -- required us to be sitting side-by-side so we could both enter our passwords. Oh, and I also had to close the checking account that I had opened because customer-service person #2 said so. *eyeroll*
But anyway, last night, finally, we got it working! We both entered our passwords on Judy's computer, and voila. Now I'm a joint owner of the condo checking account, and I can see it listed on my "My Accounts" page when I log on. I can transfer money into or out of it, including setting up an automatic transfer to pay my condo association fee each month. I immediately transferred in the money that I had been holding in my savings account all this time for the Jan and Feb condo fees.
After all that was finally done, I noticed that the bank website said something about kid savings accounts, so I clicked to check that out. Remember how I said up above that opening a new account is totally easy on the online banking? So last night I opened savings accounts for both of the kids. I can access them from my main accounts page when I log in to the bank, and I can easily transfer money around.
I started by putting $20 into each account to cover the money that I owed both kids for their allowances. Each kid gets a certain amount per week for "spend" and a certain amount for "save" and a certain amount for what we call "share" -- i.e. charity. That's the theory anyway, but in reality I'm terrible about remembering to give them their money, except when the moment comes up that they want to buy something. So I got it set up to automatically transfer the "save" portion of their allowances into their accounts every Friday. No more trying to keep track on a piece of paper or in an envelope of how much imaginary savings they have -- now it'll all be right there, and a lot less imaginary. They both have customer numbers and passwords of their own, so they can in theory log in and manage their accounts themselves, although of course in reality they won't be doing that, at least not for a while yet.
(Of course, I still need to work on remembering to give them their "spend" money each week...but that's another story....)
This seemed a lot more complicated than it needed to be. To tell the end of the story first, the condo association (whose members are the owners of the two units in the building) has a joint checking account, which was owned by the two women who originally converted the house to condos in 2005. We needed to remove the previous owner -- the woman from whom I bought my condo -- and add me. But it took all this time to a) figure that out and b) do it!
When we first moved in, I asked the other owner, Judy, how to pay the monthly condo fee. She gave me the account number and said "you just link it to your bank account and make the transfers online." The account was with ING Direct, an online bank, and Judy suggested that I might find it easiest to open a small savings account with ING for this purpose. A quick bit of research showed that this was correct, because a transfer from my checking account at Eastern Bank to the ING account wasn't going to be simple.
So I went to the ING website and tried to open a new checking account. This was complicated by the fact that I used to be an ING customer, something like 7-8 years ago, and their system still had me in it with a customer number and a bunch of security questions, which it wanted me to answer in order to get in. Of course, some of those questions were things I chose way back when, and some of them gave me trouble now -- like the name of the street my office was on. Which office was I working at back then? How am I supposed to remember that kind of thing? I ended up calling customer support, and a guy on the phone helped me get access to the account. I explained what I wanted to do, and he said "oh sure, you want to open a savings account for that," so he walked me through opening a savings account and transferring some money from my Eastern Bank account. The transfer takes 10 business days when it's a new account, so insert some lengthy hold music here. ;)
Then I couldn't figure out how to link the condo account to my account. Somewhere in this time period, ING Direct got bought out and became "CapitalOne360" so the website changed, but all the data and functions were the same. I called customer support again and was told "oh but you can't do that with a savings account, you need to have a checking account." So I sighed and rolled my eyes and opened a checking account. One benefit of using the online bank is that opening a new account is super easy, so at least there's that.
But then it STILL wasn't working. I called customer support for the third time. This time they were no help at all. (I'm eliding over a lot of the details here because, honestly, who gives a crap?) The end result was that Judy and I needed to sit down together with our computers and see what each other was seeing. So we did that, and finally had the "aha" moment where we realized that the condo account was set up as a joint checking account and still had the person who sold the condo to me, Erica, listed as the primary owner. Judy clicked the option to remove Erica as an owner on the account, which sent an email to Erica asking her to confirm. So we had to wait a couple more days for her to do that. Then Judy tried to add me as a joint owner, which -- it took us another while to figure out -- required us to be sitting side-by-side so we could both enter our passwords. Oh, and I also had to close the checking account that I had opened because customer-service person #2 said so. *eyeroll*
But anyway, last night, finally, we got it working! We both entered our passwords on Judy's computer, and voila. Now I'm a joint owner of the condo checking account, and I can see it listed on my "My Accounts" page when I log on. I can transfer money into or out of it, including setting up an automatic transfer to pay my condo association fee each month. I immediately transferred in the money that I had been holding in my savings account all this time for the Jan and Feb condo fees.
After all that was finally done, I noticed that the bank website said something about kid savings accounts, so I clicked to check that out. Remember how I said up above that opening a new account is totally easy on the online banking? So last night I opened savings accounts for both of the kids. I can access them from my main accounts page when I log in to the bank, and I can easily transfer money around.
I started by putting $20 into each account to cover the money that I owed both kids for their allowances. Each kid gets a certain amount per week for "spend" and a certain amount for "save" and a certain amount for what we call "share" -- i.e. charity. That's the theory anyway, but in reality I'm terrible about remembering to give them their money, except when the moment comes up that they want to buy something. So I got it set up to automatically transfer the "save" portion of their allowances into their accounts every Friday. No more trying to keep track on a piece of paper or in an envelope of how much imaginary savings they have -- now it'll all be right there, and a lot less imaginary. They both have customer numbers and passwords of their own, so they can in theory log in and manage their accounts themselves, although of course in reality they won't be doing that, at least not for a while yet.
(Of course, I still need to work on remembering to give them their "spend" money each week...but that's another story....)