Switching banks – how much would it take?

Is the hassle worth the Bonus cash?

 

There are a lot of opportunities to get some bonus nearly-cash freebies – everything from buying a car at a certain time, to signing up for a credit card during a promo, and then banks trying to get new customers. I took advantage of a good sign up deal at Meridian when they opened across the street and scored a bunch of extra money (in the form of interest %) for just putting what I was already holding as savings into a different bank at the right time.

 

My hubby and I decided to try and cash in (HAH!, get it?) on BMO bank offer to “switch banks and we’ll give you cash!”.  We wanted to open up a joint account somewhere anyways, so this was a good opportunity to jump on a free money deal. We set an appointment with the Manager to sign up…

 

 

Now the rest of this post is more of a rant/opinion. I wanted to post it as a reminder that not all that glitters is gold, and to weigh what could go wrong with something before jumping headlong into it.

 

After a lot of just “getting to know us” and credit score checking, we were handed a full page of details about how we get free money. This included and bunch of “must-do’s” including setting up an automatic deposit, getting a new credit card, paying that credit card bill, etc. All of these items had to be completed by a certain date. Seemed easy enough! We went throught the sign up process for a totally JOINT account on the middle plan (saying we would get $250 if we did everything), got a new credit card for each of us and left feeling pretty confident. Our first to-do checkmark was making a deposit, which we did before we left that day of our wedding gift money.

 

 

Cue the problems...

-          Immediately, the new BMO debit cards have had issue after issue. We were hit-and-miss with whether it worked somewhere or not, but it would work up to the point of then saying declined. That’s a horrible feeling when you actually do have money. We complained and they sent us new cards. My husband is on card #4 now, and I’ve stopped using mine entirely. Stores around us like Swiss Chalet still have notice on their doors that they do not accept the new BMO debit cards 

-          We found out very quickly that “Joint account” at BMO does not mean that. Someone on the account has to be “main” or something, we still don’t understand, but basically my husband can do basic things like paying a bill or seeing HIS credit card balance. He cannot make changes, see “my” credit cards balance to make a payment, and he can’t talk about the account without me around. This has been incredibly frustrating.. Mostly because we don’t understand why 

-          We needed to have printed documents for a lawyer saying what we had in all of our bank accounts. This was not easily done as my husband couldn’t print the screen I can see which shows chequing and three credit card balances. I had to “order” the printout and have it put in an envelope for pickup by my husband

-          While paying bills somehow we paid one credit card amount to the wrong card. I called to try and find out how to switch the credit on one card to pay the other card and it is a “cash advance”. They cannot immediately credit me the charge for this, so have to call them back in the next month to have it refunded (hoping the whole time the “note” he has put on the account is indeed there)

At one point we started worrying that we hadn’t checked off all the boxes on the to-do lists. My husband went to the bank on three different occasions and was told something different each time.. usually starting with “no clue”. I kept trying to call the Manager we had signed up with but no answer. My husband emailed her a few times too, again with no response. 

Finally, we got a hold of the Manager. She said she would send us the printout again so we could see if we checked everything off. She (and basically BMO in general) couldn’t tell us whether we checked all the boxes. We were told by one of the people at the bank on one of my husband’s visits that the deadline for doing everything was December, so I was concerned that I wanted to make sure we hadn’t missed anything. She informed us that actually, no, the deadline was August! All that stress and hassle with the company, and we might have missed something because we were told the wrong deadline!

 

Fast forward to now and we received the money, so we had done everything on time, thank goodness. But as I stare at the free money, I wonder if the hassle was worth it?

 

Basically 6 months of annoyances and not being able to use a debit card where our money was seems like we should have been paid more, especially if this had actually been my sole bank account. I cheated and still kept my other bank account with a working bank card and all my bill payees intact, but had I not had this I would have been totally dependent on the faulty BMO cards and customer service. If this had been the case, the money would not have been worth it.

 

As it is though, I think it was worth the aggravation for $250 and hubby and I will now work on switching accounts to somewhere else.. Maybe to TD who has a Switch for $300 offer on right now...

 

Switch and Save!

We all love our brands, right? We find something we like to eat/use and we tend to stick to it. We’ll walk into the store and grab that product without looking at the products around it. I’ve been guilty of this with our milk selection; we get the same bag every week without thinking there could be something else that is cheaper and tastes the same. I wanted to post this little blog as a reminder to always look around/ look up in Flipp the items you buy.

 

There can be a lot of savings here if you are willing to give the no name brand a try too. This is often as much as half off the “name brand” stuff, with similar tastes/effects.

 

-Water. We love Nestle water, but these can be expensive ($3-$4 for a 24 case is expensive in my brain). At some point we decided to try a case of no name bottled water for $2-$2.50 as we go through bottles like crazy (YES, I know, we should just get a water cooler or Brita filter. That’ll be our next “switch”), and found we liked the taste of this too. While we love Nestle, I think we can say we’ve switched to literally whatever is cheapest. BUT, we watch the sales and watch the Flipp app as we stock up when the Nestle water goes on for $1.99

-Milk. As I said a little earlier, we kinda blindly grab our milk every week without glancing at what else is on sale. By accident, my husband picked up a bag of the more expensive milk, which was something like $5.99 (our milk is usually $4.27). We tried it, and basically couldn’t taste a difference. Looking at the Flipp app to make our grocery list this week and I see that the more expensive brand milk we tried is actually cheaper this week than our normal brand! We will switch this week and save a little money while not forfeiting taste

-Snacks. I’ve been totally converted to the Shoppers Drug Mart “pringles” cans (I buy them when they’re $1) as I actually find they taste better than the $3 Pringles cans now. Ditto for chips and pop.. not paying for the brand name on the package means I can usually get chips for $1 each and cases of pop for $3 while still satisfying that craving

-Same for soup cans.. Walmart has some great deals on their Great Value cans for .57. My husband was able to go shopping and picked up 30 items for less than $29 that included mostly “Great Value” (Walmart’s brand) products, including 10 Great Value cans. It also had 10 bags of instant oatmeal for $1.50 total. It’s pretty impressive to get 4 bags of groceries for less than your weekly grocery budget (allowing us to go and buy meat this week too!)

-Drugs. While this is argued on some forums I see, I’m a big fan of buying the no name “knock-off” of the real thing. I buy Restoralax, which runs around $25. This gets pricey fast, so one time I tried a bottle of Shopper’s “Clearlax”. Literally worked the same way, had the same ingredients, but saved me $3. This is a similar situation to the water we buy, as I will default to the switched bottle of Clearlax, but when there is a Restoralax coupon for $3 off and the bottle goes on sale, you can bet I’ll pick up the branded stuff as it’s now the cheaper option. Similar story to cold meds and headache pills.. The same product for a little bit less?.. sign me up!

 

For every item going into my cart, I will look it up on the Flipp app and see if the same item is cheaper anywhere else. This can include searching a word like “milk” instead of “Neilson” to make sure I see all brands with that item (including the no name brand) on sale. It’s a couple dollars each trip, but over a month that adds up!

 

SOMETHING TO NOTE:

You cannot “price match” the no name brand. Price matching works on the same size and brand of a product in another store. You can price match Bananas and potatoes as these are usually not branded, but as soon as there is a brand name, even if it’s literally No Frills’ “No Name” brand, you can’t go into Walmart to price match as that exact brand isn’t carried there. If there is an amazing deal on a no-name product that week, then you will need to drive to that store to actually get it.