eloan | Online Savings Blog

Free $5 Starbucks Gift Card for Online Banking Survey
02.21.08 | Online Banking | 2 Comments | by junger

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E-Loan, where I keep an online savings account, is giving away $5 Starbucks gift cards for filling out an online banking survey.

Dear Valued Customer -

We are evaluating and enhancing our online banking website and would like your opinion on what bank products and features are important to you.

You will receive a $5 Starbucks Card to thank you for your participation in this short survey.

In accordance with our privacy policy, we will not sell or share the information you provide with third party marketers.

Thanks for helping us.

Sincerely,

Virginia Sullivan
SVP, Internet Banking
E-LOAN

Click here to access this survey:

http://www.zoomerang.com/survey.zgi?p=U28RNSUM4TEP

I did it — hopefully my gift card will come in less than the advertised 4 weeks.

Give it a shot. You don't seem to have to be an E-Loan account holder to do it.

There is one problem, however: what can you get at Starbucks for only $5?
E-Loan OSA Extends External Account Change to 60 Days
02.06.08 | Online Savings Accounts | 0 Comments | by junger

E-Loan has extended the amount of time you're allowed to change your linked external account, stretching it from every 30 days to once every 60 days.

This is one of the worst features of an otherwise good online savings account.

E-Loan only allows you have to have only external bank account linked to their OSA for deposits and transfers. It would be a slight pain if you had to change it every time you wanted to transfer money around (or rate chase.)

But you can't. You only can change your external account once every (now) 60 days.

Believe it or not, it used to be worse. The policy used to allow you to change it four times per year — 4 times! — and was adjusted to every 30 days last year.

Obviously, they want to keep your money as long as possible and prevent easy rate chasing, but they won't say that.

The official reasoning?

In order to ensure our customers' funds remain secure, we are extending the time period between changes to your external linked account from 30 days to 60 days from the account open date or the last external account change.

Part of that "security" means you can't pull money from an external account, and you can't even use Wesabe (which doesn't log in to your account) to download your data.

Nevertheless, the savings account pays a 3.75% APY — one of the highest available — so I still have money there.

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