Engage in PR

They say that there are three really stressful moments in your life:

1. Moving
2. Starting a new job
3. Having a baby

In 2006 I decided to do all three at the same time, brilliant! Started a job on March 1st, closed on a house on March 17th and my wife had our son on March 20th. It is no wonder that since that time I have much less hair on top of my head and horrible back pain. “They” also say that you forget pain and stress over time, which really can be the only explanation for why I’m now doing the SAME EXACT THING! But now I decided to up the ante by moving 2,000 miles away. Good times.

Why do I share this information, because throughout all of these types of life-changing moments you deal with lots of ‘third-party people’. Realtors, movers, banks, mortgage brokers, doctors, new colleagues, etc. I’ve already talked about our broker, mover and Realtor, but this week we had to have a face down with the banks.

I’m not going to bore you with the details, but let’s just say that we decided to put the proceeds from our sale in Boston into the ING Direct account I set up in 1999 and have been using as a regular since. It was a good idea at the time…make a little bit of interest on that money before I needed to transfer it to the title company for the close in Texas. ING, by the way, markets themselves as the online bank, using words on their “About Page” like “electronic banking”, “24-hour access to your account”, “flexibility, freedom, and security”.

Well, unfortunately, yours truly did not read the fine print…ING does not allow any electronic transfer of funds AND they put a five-day hold on all fund transferred into your account once deposited. I had transferred the money on June 30th, it reached ING on July 2nd and because of the July 4th holiday would not be available to me until…wait for it…July 10th. I found all of this out on Monday of this week, three days before I needed to use this money to close on our new house in Austin.

This is an online bank, but they don’t allow you to transfer funds electronically (like all other “brick and mortar” banks) and they take nearly twice as long to recognize pending funds than Bank of America. That sucks, obviously, but it’s actually all there in the writing and shame on me for not reading the fine print. But here, my friends and loyal readers, is what they call “the rub”.

We called ING on four different occasions, talking to 9 people in total and not one person at ING was helpful nor did one person try to give us any sort of creative ideas to try and make this happen. It was at this point when, and this is difficult to write, I stated to a manager at ING “You don’t seem to understand, if we can’t figure this out, in some way, my family is homeless…we have NO place to live.” Imagine that said in a very dramatic tone and you’ll realize how pathetic I was and felt at the time. The response, “Nothing we can do for you.” In 2 cases I didn’t even get a “sorry”.

Ultimately we figured it out because we have an amazing mortgage broker (Zander, many thanks) and because Bank of America was understanding, compassionate, smart, creative and downright human. The latter was particularly true when we visited, face-to-face, with B of A branch managers. My wife got some amazing help from a great guy in Boston (Regan, leave the guys’ name in the comments if you have his info) and I went to two B of A’s today and got some tremendous help at the last minute from folks who honestly wanted to make a positive impact on my life. Thank you!

So, here is the thing, when it came down to it, two things became very apparent to me:

1. Just because something is “online” does not make it smarter and in fact doesn’t even make it more modern;
2. Face-to-face still rules when you need to just get something done or when you need to connect with people on a deeper level than online can ever allow;

–Kyle F. Flaherty