banking when full timing
I currently have BofA but was wondering what other banks provide the same coverage across the states. We have a few small time banks here but would like a bank with a wider range and one that is sort ...
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Our goal in retirement was to travel 90% of the time although Covid has slowed that down to more of a distancing in the trailer program. Either way we needed to do banking away from home. We set up all of our recurring bills to direct debit a credit union account in which we keep minimal money. To get cash on the road we opened an account with Ally Bank which was recommended by a personal finance magazine. At the time, they advertised many free ATMs and up to $10 per month of refunded bank ATM fees. We found the free ATMs to mostly be in stores with limited amounts of cash available per transaction--It didn't seem effective to me to make a special trip to a free ATM to get a little bit of cash. While using bank ATMs worked at first, soon the Ally card processor started blocking the transactions as potential fraud even though we were using the same ATM repeatedly with no real fraud. That got to be so annoying that we dropped Ally and went back to Chase (who has a strong presence around our land locked house and in the Eastern US) for our cash needs . In the days of Covid we have found that using charge cards frequently has dramatically reduced our cash needs so we hit a bank ATM for a big chunk of cash when we run low. We'll pay a bank fee someday if necessary, but it hasn't been yet. We maintain 5 charge cards in case one gets locked and never (as said above) use a debit card for anything but cash from an ATM because a hacked debit card can lock up your bank cash for several days. Note: your experience with Ally may be different; in our experience Ally just wanted to blame their third party card processor instead of actually fixing the problem.
