This morning I did a terrible thing. <\/p>\n
I walked into the Harvard Square Bank of America and opened a checking account. Ugh! I’ve always hated the idea of these big entities swallowing up the little ones. But as they say, they gave me an offer I couldn’t refuse:<\/p>\n
For opening up a checking account, they gave me $100. <\/p>\n
How could I turn that down? Besides, instead of having to write a check to Randy each month for “rent” and utilities, I figured I could just direct deposit a portion of my check into this account each month. Then, technically, Randy can do with it as he pleases (he already has a Bank of America account and this apparently will make it easy to transfer from my account to his account within seconds – versus having to wait 3-7 days for a transfer from my existing bank).<\/p>\n
Yeah, it’s all kinda’ convoluted. In the end, I really only did it for the $100. It saddens me, though, that I am now one of the masses. For the past decade and a half I’ve prided myself on only having accounts with smaller institutions (currently a credit union). Yep, that’s me – rooting for the underdog. Holding out for the return of the milkman and the doctor making house calls.<\/p>\n
Oh well, the times…they are a changin’.<\/p>\n
On the plus side, the customer service representative revealed that my credit score is 800 (out of a possible 850). She said that in 18 years of banking she’s only seen 2 scores that high before. She said she’ll occasionally see scores in the 700’s, but most are in the 600’s or lower. That made me feel slightly better for selling out.<\/p>\n
(Photo found on Flickr, from sandcastlematt’s gallery. Ironically, this photo was taken in Harvard Square).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This morning I did a terrible thing. I walked into the Harvard Square Bank of America and opened a checking account. Ugh! I’ve always hated the idea of these big entities swallowing up the little ones. But as they say, they gave me an offer I couldn’t refuse: For opening up a checking account, they […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":74,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1419","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1419","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/74"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1419"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1419\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1419"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1419"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/snarl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1419"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}