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336 points dvrp | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.201s | source
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mitchellh ◴[] No.45056901[source]
Funny to see this pop up again (I'm the author). The year is now 2025 and I still use Chase as a personal bank and I'm now discovering new funny banking behaviors. I'll use this as a chance to share. :)

My company had an exit, I did well financially. This is not a secret. I'm extremely privileged and thankful for it. But as a result of this, I've used a private bank (or mix) for a number of years to store the vast majority of my financial assets (over 99.99% of all assets, I just did the math). An unfortunate property of private banks is they make it hard to do retail-like banking behaviors: depositing a quick check, pulling cash from an ATM, but ironically most importantly Zelle.

As such, I've kept my Chase personal accounts and use them as my retail bank: there are Chase branches everywhere, its easy to get to an ATM, and they give me easy access to Zelle! I didn't choose Chase specifically, I've just always used Chase for personal banking since I was in high school so I just kept using them for this.

Anyways, I tend to use my Chase account to pay a bunch of bills, just because it's more convenient (Zelle!). I have 3 active home construction projects, plus pay my CC, plus pretty much all other typical expenses (utilities, car payments, insurance, etc.). But I float the money in/out of the account as necessary to cover these. We do accounting of all these expenses at the private bank side, so its all tracked, but it settles within the last 24-48 hours via Chase.

Otherwise, I keep my Chase balance no more than a few thousand dollars.

This really wigs out automated systems at Chase. I get phone calls all the time (like, literally multiple times per week) saying "we noticed a large transfer into your account, we can help!" And I cheekily respond "refresh, it's back to zero!" And they're just confused. To be fair, I've explained the situation in detail to multiple people multiple times but it isn't clicking, so they keep calling me.

I now ignore the phone calls. Hope I don't regret that later lol.

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bigstrat2003 ◴[] No.45056958[source]
I read the whole story and I'm still struggling to understand what you did wrong here. You indicated many times "I know, that was a mistake" (or similar phrases), but each time I was baffled because I saw no mistakes. It was your business, and you had every right to move around the funds within your account. What gives anyone at Chase the right to say diddly squat about how you manage your business' finances?
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gwbas1c ◴[] No.45057154[source]
TFA didn't really explain the mistake.

What I think it was:

1: Chase's business account wasn't appropriate for a tech startup; nor was it appropriate for the amount of money Mitchell was handling.

2: When your bank calls you after a very, very large money transfer, you should take the call.

That being said: In today's world where every other phone call is some telemarketer trying to scam you or otherwise sell you something you don't want or need, I can sympathize with why Mitchell blew off the first call.

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stephen_g ◴[] No.45058414[source]
They basically had no problems through $35M+ of money coming in except a few phone calls trying to sell him some banking services... I wouldn't really call it 'not appropriate' for a startup... All it was is probably the guy trying to say "hey maybe you'd be interested in parking some of that capital in a term deposit" or offering some credit products...

It is a bit weird how actively the guy tried to engage but it probably is just because it was one of the largest accounts opened through that branch - if they'd opened an account with the same bank but a branch in down-town SF instead of in the suburbs of LA then they would have had an account manager more accustomed to that kind of business and it presumably wouldn't have been as weird...

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1. crooked-v ◴[] No.45058805[source]
I certainly wouldn't label that 'do you need help' opening as 'engagement'. Something as simple as 'that's a lot of cash just sitting in that checking account, there are a few better options that could get you good returns on that while still being easy to use for expected expenses' would have been actually engaging.