@longtimelurker wrote:
[OK, I know this doesn't quite belong here, [Mod cut - No. No it doesn't, which is why it was moved to Personal Finance, a subforum created for these very types of questions.]]
I opened an account at a certain CU, and made the needed $10 deposit for a member share account. Checking in, I see that my balance is $0, because there is also a pending $10 withdrawal. When I called to ask, I'm told that this is what they do until the account is closed, basically a hold against the needed $10.
As far as I can see though, this is depriving me of the 0.01%APR on $10, so there goes my retirement plan!
All my other CUs seem to use a "Balance" and Available Balance (which is $5-$25 less), so you can't withdraw below the minimum, but the interest is earned on the whole balance.
Do others agree with this experience.
I'm more miffed about holding periods on deposits with limits over $X, usually $5k, which tend to get treated as you described. I made a $200k deposit into DCU last year and there was a staged holding period whereby some of the funds became available next day, but it took almost a week for the full amount to become "available" to me. Granted, dividend checking caps out at $100k, but there were a couple days where $70k+ of my balance wasn't subject to interest/dividend of 0.5%, which may well have been many tens of cents.
To be fair, we also sent a $450k wire into one of our non-CU accounts and that also took its sweet time to become available (even though it was a wire!), so this isn't unique to CUs.
I think for both of us though, the real answer is these are first-world problems and unlikely to really matter in the long-term. I'm not going to terminate my relationships with these institutions just because they deep-sixed my savings goals for 2020 by withholding 3 days of interest.
