Banks Blow
Not a Fan of Banks
Modern banking is an experience in frustration. They have gotten away from their origins and purpose. Originally, banks were a place to store and use capital in the most simplistic terms. Banks handled time deposits and demand deposits and little else.1. Now they are all financially engineered fee machines. Not only do they use your money to make money, but they charge you fees to do it!
With the exception of some local banks where you can establish a personal relationship with a banker, customer service is non-existent. Moving money takes forever and is severely limited at times. I used a bank (for a while) that had a $3000 cap on any electronic transfers in or out of the bank. That's completely useless. It was easier to write a check. Just think about how stupid that is.
Technology to the Rescue
Luckily we live in a world of wondrous technology. There is no reason why money should be tied up for three (or more) days.2 and limited in quantity in this world where information travels at the speed of light. Bitcoin and stable coins can already do this. They are coming to your banking system whether you like it or not. Transaction fees should go down as will transfer times. If you have not tried them yet, you should. Because they will an integrated part of the financial system sooner rather than later.
The entire time I am waiting the days it takes money to transfer account to account in our archaic system, I thought "Bitcoin solves this" - and it does. I have only played around with it on a limited basis, but it has promise to solve these problems for sure. Maybe the banking system will get its act together and solve it on its own ... yeah sure ... that's the ticket.
Either way, something has to give. Because the current system blows.
Rob
To understand the differences between time deposits and demand deposits look here↩
I recently tried to transfer money between accounts to pay some expected bills. It took six days to show up in my account. Hell, in six days I could have driven to the vendor (they were in Chicago - a two day drive) with cash, paid them, and driven back to my house.↩