Anyone use ING Direct for a checking account?

[vacationer1954]

Bumping this thread. Any more experiences? We decided against using ING as our main checking account but only because we found that Fidelity Investments offers mostly the same online features (except the remote deposit capability but we deposit checks remotely to ING). We don't see much cash these days but we have a small local bank which we keep $50 in just to have a place to deposit cash and get cashier's checks if we ever need them, transferring between the local bank and either ING or Fidelity as needed since they pay better interest than the local bank.

 

[katied718]

I've used ING for several years for separate savings accounts. I really like it. I would caution however with the debit card. I don't use it very often, but I tried to use it at a large corporate grocery store chain and it was declined. I called ING and they said it was MasterCard that declined it cuz they probably had to much fraud at that store. I told him that I actually used another MasterCard debit to pay for that purchase and the rep rephrased and said its actually the bank and MasterCard that determine what stores are "blacklisted", and that must be one of them. There was no way for him to tell me what stores are blacklisted except-he knew for certain Walmart was also one of the stores. So if I wanted to shop at one of those 2 stores, I would need to pull cash out at the ATM before I made the purchase. It's a good thing I didn't have 3 carts of groceries & no other means to pay at the register! So, I will just have to keep my local credit union account and continue to use ING as a separate savings vehicle.

 

[amylevan]

FYI, ING has been bought out by Capital One. Changes to come in the new year, so I'd hold off until the dust has settled a bit to see what/if anything is going to change.

 

[snarlingcoyote]

FYI, ING has been bought out by Capital One. Changes to come in the new year, so I'd hold off until the dust has settled a bit to see what/if anything is going to change.

Yep. My wdw vacation fund has always been with ING. I'm the teensiest bit verklempt about the buy out myself. I'm planning to move my ING account to a local credit union.

 

[Colleen27]

I haven't had my account long but so far it suits my purposes perfectly - it is accessible (via debit card or ATM) if I need it, but "out of sight" enough to be a good place to park short-term savings. Over Black Friday they offered a $125 sign up bonus that was too good to pass up and so far I'm pleased with the account. It takes 2-3 days to transfer funds from our household checking account and there's an ATM just a few blocks from home should I ever need immediate access to the money I have there.

 

[vacationer1954]

The things folks have mentioned in the last few messages were some more reasons why we decided to go with Fidelity instead of ING. The Capital One buy out does make me wonder what will change. If we make a lot of changes now relying on ING and then ING changes we could be very disappointed. However, I guess that could work out the other way with Capital One making things better. But it really was the ATM thing that had us most worried, for two reasons.

First, ING is on the Allpoint network, and while it seemed like the ATMs were everywhere it also seemed that they were in a lot of seedy places, gas stations, drug stores, and so on. Fidelity is on the Visa network and those ATMs are in a lot of banks as well as some stores.

Second, ING pays a lot of interest on high balances. Suze Orman says to try to build up to a year of expenses in savings, and right now I don't see any place to put that kind of money that makes much more interest than ING checking. So I'd be worried to use an ATM card that has access to so much of our emergency fund especially given the kind of ATM machines in the Allpoint network. I'd be worried about machines that would read the card and steal the PIN.