These people live in the Twilight Zone. Don't "go there" with them. I will explain…read more
Moving proceeds from a matured CD to another bank, because rates are better in the latter, should be a routine transaction. Banks do this many times a day. As a retiree, I need to live off of interest, so I have to move money to where it will earn the most, and Wash Fed is behind the curve...badly, I might add. So I approached the Wash Fed Branch Manager to let him know the move of money from a matured CD was coming in a week, and he assured me it would not be a problem.
The day the move was supposed to happen, first, the "back office" (Wash Fed team who handles the movement) balked and said they needed a "custodian signature" to move the money. The receiving bank virtually never receives such requests, but jumped through hoops to get the signature. Then, the next day, some woman (who sounded like a lost lamb) from the Wash Fed back office called me to say the money can't move because she can't read the order to move it. That call should have gone to the Branch Manager and not to me.
By then I knew that this can bog down into an interminable quagmire. If you asked 5 different back office people what the proper procedure was to move the money, you would get 6 different answers. So I called Wash Fed downtown. They advised me that they do not meet with customers for escalations. They advised me to work through the Branch Manager, who in this case was a nice twentysomething kid who's being jerked around by the back office. Then I finally got to an "arbitrater" downtown who was able to cut the noise and get the money moved. Thing is, after trusting Wash Fed with a piece of my life savings for 5 years, I'm not supposed to have to jump through hoops, pound on the table and threaten litigation to get them to do what should be a routine thing.
Well, you may say, they have a right to impose reasonable controls on IRA money. Yes, agreed, the key word here is "reasonable". At AlaskaUSA, by contrast, they issue you your IRA check on the spot in 5 minutes or less, with the new bank as payee rather than you...so the rules are fully respected (i.e. you cannot cash the check) yet the customer is not inconvenienced.
At Wash Fed, the back office lives in the Twilight Zone, a world apart from the reality you and I know. In the Twilight Zone, they can impose any condition and delay they want even if it deviates from industry standards, use any procedure they want at the moment, and play God with your money. And believe me, you may think your money is yours, but it WILL NOT move until you do everything that God has told you you must. And no, you cannot talk directly with God, if there's a real issue, though an arbiter might be persuaded to intervene on your behalf. But that works if and only if God agrees to go along with their coaching, so start praying.
Save your self respect, and your hair, and give your business to someone who lives in the same world as you and me.