Beware of New Chase Accounts!!

Friends, we all know Washington Mutual has been replaced by Chase, and I personally think the friendly Wamu culture is no longer there as well.

I may be an unhappy customer with complaints, but I want to tell you my finding so you can be aware as well.

1. Starting from mid-October, Chase will replace both of wamu checking and saving accounts with their own chase accounts. In addition, chase will charge a $3 ACH outgoing transfer fee to BOTH new chase checking and saving accounts. It’s about the only bank I know that will actually charge you on ACH transfer. If you do any online banking to transfer your fund to pay credit card or any external banking account (meaning other banks), it will either be a wire-transfer or an ACH transfer. (ACH is the slow transfer that often takes 3 days while wire-transfer is the kind that takes the transfer instantly, which costs $10).

I do use my account to pay for credit cards regularly, so I am very unhappy about this new fee that I will incur every month each time I pay for a credit card.

2. Chase no longer waive over-activity fee for their customers (while Wamu does so). For my case, Chase actually manipulated the ending statement period in my account from 22 to 24 of the month, so they can charge an excess-activity fee of $10.

The transfer that I’ve done was from saving into checking (online). Wamu did not count this internal online transfer as an outgoing transfer, but chase does. I asked them how would I transfer my money out of saving into checking without hitting the fee, and they told me that I would have to come into the branch to do that. I believe that defeats the point of online banking.

In sum, watch out for the new fees that might occurs in your chase banking statement in the future. For this, I have decided to take the hassle and search for a new bank. (You may ask any chase representative to verify the information I said.)