Friday, September 26, 2008

WAMU

Today the mortgage crisis became personal. Our bank was bought by JP Morgan Chase. The current price for wamu's stock is $0.16. Holy crap. My bank is dead. I have been a member of Washington Mutual since 1999 when I opened an account in college.

I love this bank. Before opening an account here I used to bank at Wells Fargo. It sucks to bank with them. There were tons of hidden fees and I felt it was costing me money to bank there. That sucks. I believe you should not have to pay to keep your money in a bank, you might as well keep it in your mattress.
This was why WAMU was so awesome. There are no fees. For anyone. Ever. It never cost you to keep your money there.
The merger basically threatens all of this. I am sure the free checking, checks, money orders, and 1 free overdraft charge per year will end. I am not sure what will happen with the merger but I feel JP Morgan will nickel and dime us in order to make money and pass the cost of the merger on us, the consumers.
I know this it kind of silly to complain. We still have our bank account and our money and we didn't loose our house. This whole housing crisis is crap. No-one will go to jail, but we have to pay for the bad decisions of others. The whole situation is horrible.

5 comments:

Alex said...

You must have had a better WAMU account than I did ... we had "no fees," because we paid a $5/month fee ...

Also, I used to hate that they didn't charge other people a fee to use their ATM, but charged me, a WAMU customer, a fee if I used someone else's ATM. If anything, I say charge the people who DON'T let you hold their money and use those fees to cover what you would charge your OWN customers ...

Anyway, yeah. It was weird to hear my bank failed, too.

Lee said...

Yeah, but what was with 'WAMU'? Washington Mutual was a fine name.

april said...

It stinks that you have to start over, but I'm really glad your assets are in tact. We never banked with WAMU, but we too had problems with Wells Fargo. We've had better luck with credit unions, do you have any nearby?

Shawn said...

Maybe they went bankrupt BECAUSE they weren't charging you fees?

Steve said...

no, it was because they got greedy and bought a bunch of crappy mortgages, not because of the fees.