Comments on: E-Trade Online Savings Account Opening Process

By: sarcasmo

sarcasmo — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 08:46:42 +0000

I believe I made a mistake in opening a brokerage account with Etrade. If you’re a smaller investor, like me, I don’t reccommend them. Their fees are too high.

The 3.3% advertised here is no longer available, I believe it’s under 2% now. What really bugs me are the brokerage fees, though. The $7-$10 trades they advertise are bologna, unless you have at least 50k in your account, and unfortunately, I don’t. The fee for me is $13–if you’re trading in relatively small amounts, and have to make at least $26 for every transaction, it’s absolutely not worth it.
And, if you don’t make trades, you’re charged $40 a quarter–obscene, imho.

I’ve learned my lesson, I might as well put my money into bonds and commodities. If you’re a low volume trader, do yourself a favor and go with ScottTrade instead

By: Jon

Jon — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 19:51:12 +0000

For what it’s worth I used to highly recommend E*Trade, that was until last month… I was 10 days into my honeymoon in Hawaii when my ATM card stopped working. I called the 1-800 number and found it that they were unable to help, I needed to call the account security office or something like that. So I called them. No surprise, they were closed, since I was in Hawaii and they work 9-5 eastern time M-F. So I left my name and number for them to call me back on their answering service. Since it was Saturday I was stuck. I used my brick and mortar bank ATM card and paid the fee, getting enough cash to last me the remaining 4 days of honeymoon. They never called me back. Back on the mainland, I called and waited on hold for 30 minutes, then I talked to some idiot that wanted to verify where I logged onto my account from. 15 minutes later he finally figured out that ncr.com was Quicken… Grrr. “Sorry for the inconvenience.” I do have to say E-Trade is great, until you hit one of their snags. Google “ETrade account frozen” for more horror stories even worse than mine.

By: nickel

nickel — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 20:23:44 +0000

pluto: Yes, but for liquid assets, you can’t do too much better, and you could do a lot worse.

By: pluto

pluto — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 18:58:10 +0000

the Inflation in the USA is
3.7%
so for your etrade account with 3.30% apy
in one year you dont gain anything

By: Jacqui

Jacqui — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 17:20:12 +0000

I just opened one of these accounts myself. The funds appear in your account in about 2 days — but they will remain unavailable until they receive your signature card. And you have to wait for it in the mail and mail it back in.

As for the verification, they only let you transfer in up to $100 from an unverified account to set up your new E*Trade account. Once the account is open, you can verify your newly linked account online (for some banks) or by the good old 2 small charges method (they DO NOT take back the tiny deposits afterward like some places). Otherwise you can’t use it for additional deposits. You can’t activate ACH transfer out to a linked account until your signature card has been received (just like you can’t make any other withdrawals).

So basically, you can’t use the account for the first week and a half-ish. But I’m still very happy with them. And I love their online banking interface.

The savings account is NOT eligible for online bill-pay, but you can open up a free (no minimum, no interest) or MaxRate (minimum for no fee, decent interest) checking account if you want to use that feature. Same process has to be gone through for the checking account — wait for signature card, etc.

Now if only Sharebuilder wouldn’t being such a pain in the a** about transferring over my Roth IRA!

By: Danny B

Danny B — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 16:31:04 +0000

We have been with them since 7/09/2007 totally happy.Just moved checking and brokerage accounts over to them also

By: S

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 14:29:59 +0000

I found it interesting when you said they don’t do trial deposits. My husband (then fiance) and I opened a joint complete savings account in January 2008, and I know there were trial deposits. In fact, I added another linked account in the summer time, and had trial deposits entered then as well. Wonder if this is a new thing, or maybe it’s just a later step once they set the account up with your initial deposit? I’m curious to find out.