Thursday, June 22, 2006

Wire Transfers

I successfully completed my first wire transfer yesterday. Welcome to the 21st century, right? The funny thing is that I'm usually okay with sending checks in the mail. But lately, I've had a couple of strange incidents with misdelivered mail. Factor in the risk of theft from idiots who have nothing better to do than steal blank checks from people, and you have recipe for disaster. So, rather than overnight the check to my brother (to help with the down payment on a house), I spent $20 to wire transfer the money instead. I figured, as an added bonus, he wouldn't need to run to the bank to deposit the check and then wait 5 business days for it to clear.

Of course, the transaction was a lot slower than I was led to believe. I initiated the transfer via a live teller on Monday afternoon at 2:55PM, but because the teller was too busy eavesdropping on her neighbors conversation, we wound up missing the end of day cut off by 4 minutes. Anyway, when I asked when the transaction would be completed, she told me by mid-morning the next day. Hmm. Well, by Tuesday evening, I was beginning to get worried. Did I give her the correct routing number and bank account number? But I checked everything before I signed the paperwork? So I told myself to give it another day. It finally showed up as a completed transaction Wednesday morning. Whew! Moving around significant amounts of money can be quite nerve wracking. Here's hoping that I never have to do this again.

1 comment:

Single Ma said...

Awww, you're such a good sister!

I know how anxious you must have felt...especially after the money leaves your acct. I experienced something similar when I opened an HSBC account. I did a large bank to bank transfer. I knew it would take HSBC 3 biz days to process the ACH pull. The $$ was withdrawn from my checking account on biz day 2 (Fri) and didn't show in HSBC until biz day 4 (Tues), although it had a post date of Mon. Needless to say, I was very irritated. Surely technology can transfer cash faster than that!