You’d think it would be pretty important to "do a bank" right, right? Well, I’m stuck in amateur hour right now and am attempting to get the fuck out of it by the end of the year. Quite some time ago, T-Mobile had a great idea. Why not offer banking services to our customers? We can offer extra incentives for them and blah blah blah. At the time, the huge draw was a 4% interest, so I jumped on board. And it was fine for a long time. Then the inevitable enshittification happened.
The first change was tinkering with the 4% interest. I blogged about it too, but in short, you had to make a number of transactions per month to get the higher rate. Then, although this should have been seamless, and it mostly was, they switched the bank behind the scenes. So, another bank took over the duties of actually managing the money while T-Mobile maintained a consistent front end. No change in routing or account numbers, no big deal. But that wasn’t the end.
Then, T-Mobile decided they would recreate the site for themselves instead of using whatever software was used as the font-end before. It would integrate into T-Life where it didn’t before. They had some positive changes, like getting rid of the transactions per month. No change in routing number, but uh, you have a new account number. And that’s just the beginning of it.
I got a new debit card in the mail. I don’t know how much weight this carries, but the card is flimsy as fuck. In hindsight, it’s fully representative of the whole change. And so I logged in to the new website, and now for some reason, my 2-factor authentication has become a 3-factor authentication. Every time I log in, I have to verify a code from a text, then verify another code sent to my email. As Ace Ventura would say, "Three factors is too much!"
Once in the website, things are, well, cheaper. The previous website was nothing fun to use, but this version was even more disappointing. But it was whatever. I didn’t care too much how it looked, as long as it worked. And until I had to pay my first bill, it suited my needs.
When I had to pay my first utility bill, which I do manually from the bank site, I logged in and found, what the fuck, all my payees were wiped out in the transition. So I had to look up all my bill information and started creating a new payee. And I found, what the fuck, you can’t use a PO Box as a payment address. WHAT? I assume it’s just some early limitation and because I need this bill paid now, I set up the payment in my other checking account at another bank. I figure I might as well set up my other utility bill there as well since it’s due this month.
The next month I don’t even really think about seeing if the address problem has been fixed and just pay my utilities from the other bank. But then, a couple of weeks later, I get an email from my mortgage company saying, "You need to contact us immediately." You know, scams are always ASAP, world-ending, gotta do it now type stuff, so just to prove to myself it was a scam, I logged in to my mortgage account and saw, what the fuck, my mortgage payment is a month late! Oh yeah, I guess that scheduled payment would have been wiped out along with all my payees… God damn it!
I get all caught up on my mortgage paying through their website and go back to T-Mobile Money to get this all straightened out. They STILL don’t take PO Boxes for payees. So I call them. And I was very calm and matter-of-fact about the problem. And when they confirmed that yes, that is how it works and there are no plans to change it, I was very calm and matter-of-fact that I would be migrating my account elsewhere. Yes sir, would you like to take a survey rating the service you received today? Nah.
Direct deposit is now changed at work. Final bill payments have cleared, now it’s time to move the money out. In a final example of "we haven’t done shit with this website", you can’t initiate a transfer from the T-Mobile Money website. The instructions are to use the other bank’s website to initiate the transfer FROM T-Mobile. You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. So I go to my other checking account bank and try to link the accounts. For whatever reason, they say the routing number is invalid. Unbelievable. So I go to another of my banks and set up a linked account. They want me to verify the account by logging in. My credentials don’t work (maybe because of 3FA, who the fuck knows), so I have to do the old fashioned way of confirming trial deposits after 3 days.
So if all goes well, I’ll have most all my money moved by the middle of this month. I’ll confirm my direct deposit goes to the other checking account next month, make sure I pay all my bills from that other bank, then move the final balance out and close out T-Mobile in December. And then I’m back at MidFlorida.
It’s funny, I closed out MidFlorida years ago when I had a plan to move to Atlanta, When that plan fell through, T-Mobile Money became my primary – I had previously only used them for the 4% interest. I have a home equity loan with MidFlorida and they offered me $100 to open a checking account, so why not. Home again.
0 Comments.