E*Turd

I figured out what the "E" in E*Trade stands for. It stands for "dumbass."

I took out a home equity loan through E-Loan a couple of months ago. As they said they would, they sold the loan, and E*Trade's banking division apparently bought it. Great, I thought, a nice modern online outfit, so doing business electronically with them should be easy as anything, right?

No.

First off, unlike my oil company, the trash company, the cable company, the insurance company, my mortgage company, and every single credit card I have, even Lowe's and gas cards, I cannot pay my home equity loan to E*Trade directly from my existing checking account. The only way you can pay it without a fee (or having to write a paper check, which I will not do) is to have another E*Trade account. Then, apparently, you can just shovel money around as needed.

So, I figured, what the fuck, maybe I'll trade some stocks sometime, whatever. I set up an E*Trade account, and sent it $1500 from my credit union account. See, I can't send my loan account the money directly, but for some reason I can send money directly to a brokerage account and then shift it over. Stupid? Yes. Overkill? Yes. Asinine? Yes. Will I come up with some positive reason for this needing to be done? No.

But I send the money, it vanishes from my credit union account as intended, shows up in my brokerage account, but I can't actually transfer it to the loan. I try three different times, they all come back "insufficient funds," even though I can see that their system says I have $1500 sitting there.

Well, I wasted a good amount of time talking to a customer service droid who sounded like she was underwater, and she insisted that "well, it's a new account, so your funds won't be available to withdraw for ten business days." This, as I was physically looking at the account agreement, which says specifically that such electronic transfers will be available in a day to three days. She could not find anything on their website that said anything about ten days, though she spluttered and insisted that "that's how it is anyway."

I finally asked her, "look, if you guys don't adhere to your own posted account rules, why the hell should anyone else?" I also told her I wasn't trying to withdraw anything, I was trying to pay them money and if they didn't want to take it, that's their problem.

I later called again and got somebody else to put the payment over, which should take place Monday.

As I've said before, if you make it hard for people to do business with you, don't be surprised if... they don't.

I emailed back and forth with Kelly a lot last night while watching the Orioles lose. She's going to be up in Virginia Beach with a friend of hers this weekend... we're hoping to finally be able to meet on the weekend of the 19th-21st. If we meet on Saturday of that weekend on really get along, the irony will be rather intense: that would have been my eleventh anniversary.

As it is, May 17 would have been my mother's 63rd birthday. Had I married Betsy years ago, that would have been our 20th anniversary.