You can find a Bank Transfer Day “event” on facebook with 40,000+ saying they will attend. I found deeper coverage here – according to this article, Bank Transfer Day is the creation of a solitary activist, Kristen Christian from Los Angeles – a small business owner fed up with being gouged by big banks.
Quite a different spin on Guy Fawkes day, isn’t it? Of course, many more of us will talk about doing this, but not follow through.
Some banks charge a fee for closing accounts. Moving or discontinuing direct deposits and direct payments takes effort. But still, it looks like enough folk are really, really angry, fed up, and disgusted by banks that pay no interest and are constantly adding fees, while they pay top executives millions of dollars in bonuses – each.
Do those banks think ALL their depositers are spineless, oblivious sheep??? Looks like November 5, 2011 could put the theory of bankers that depositers are stupid and lazy to the test.
My research made clear that the activist, Kristen Christian, who is put up the “Facebook Event’ Bank Transfer Day is NOT affiliated with the Occupy Wall Street or any “Occupy group” so “they” aren’t doing this though some of her images might suggest otherwise.
Fees will be charged by some banks and I would guess eventually all banks to remain competitive.
We could go the Credit Union route (my choice) but remember most CUs don’t pay ANY taxes, although I’m sure many banks have legally minimized their tax debt as well.
So I repeat, which banks should people “transfer” their money TO?
However, this seems to be a significant item to watch. On the other hand, I am well situated in terms of where my funds are held (such as they are – not, I am sure, in a class with yours.)
Do you think this attempt to piggy-back on Occupy will lead to an actual run on any banks? Inquiring minds want to know.
The numbers of OWS… are too small and the deposits maintained by these people may not be significant. Also, I was just reading the NYT that many depositors are “locked into” their banks (BOA has 29 million depositors) due to services like on-line banking and the hassle of changing all their payees… so the vast majority will stick with whomever they are currently with.
I am a BOA customer but I also support my local CU heavily since most CUs support the community so well. If they could develop a solid, feature rich on-line banking software product I would swap from BOA almost completely, but not for the same reasons as the activists have. I just like to support locally when I can, but only when it makes sense and right now it doesn’t.
n/t
This seemed like a perfectly reasonable comment. Why?
Let’s cause a bank run and crash the economy! That’ll show them.
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Or stated differently: this is one of the stupidest things I’ve heard in a while.
But I considered it worth letting folks know about, and watching it to see what happened, as well as (I thought) warning about it. I tried to make the warning part of the post stronger. Did I succeed??
Sounds like the free market at work to me. As to JohnD’s question about where to transfer to it looks like the idea is to move your business from the BOAs of the world to community banks with more customer-friendly policies. Didn’t Steve Grossman propose doing basically this with the state’s money?
Herald story (including a snappy picture of Mr Grossman)
Did this program continue to grow or was it just an idea?