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Closing My Emigrant Direct Account
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After sixteen months of sitting in carbonite, the funds in my Emigrant Direct MyWay CD matured and I withdraw the last of my funds from Emigrant Direct. Ever since I discovered that Dollar Savings Direct was the same as Emigrant Direct, except with a much higher interest rate, I’ve been putting all my funds there. Fortunately, the Emigrant Direct MyWay CD was yielding me a fat 4.50% APY for the last sixteen months so I wasn’t complaining too loudly. Now that it had matured, I was ready to close the account because it had outlived its usefulness.
One minor bit of advice, Emigrant Direct compounds interest daily but credits your account monthly, so I would wait until the start of a new month before transferring out assets and requesting closure.
- Transfer all of your assets to your external bank account.
- Click “Customer Service” and send customer service a message that you’d like to close your account. My message was a succinct “I would like to close all of my accounts.”
- Wait.
- The next business day, they’ll send you a message within their internal system notifying you that they’ll be closing your account.
Here’s the message I received one day later:
Dear JIM, Thank you for contacting Emigrant Direct. While we are disappointed that you will be closing your account with us, it is our pleasure to assist you. We have received your request to close your account. Please allow 1 to 2 business days for your request to be processed. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us at 1-800-836-1997. We are here to assist our customers seven days a week from 8:00am to 11:30pm Eastern Time. Once again, thank you for contacting us and we are sorry to lose you as a valued customer. Sincerely, Kim P.
And just like that, account closed!
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Way to go.. Now if only closing all accounts and canceling services were that easy. I think I am going to have to close out of an OnBank account they went from a 3.6 to around 1.2 in the last 3 weeks.
We just went through the same thing. Only problem was that our external checking account is closed. I called and they said that I should send a secure message from their website explaining the situation and asking them to send me a check. I did, and just yesterday our check for $1.01 showed up in the mail. Haven’t used the account in a couple of years, but I left a dollar in it to keep it active. Apparently it earned $0.01 interest at some point.
Bizarre…just an hour ago I took the steps to close my Emigrant Savings account. After hearing about safety concerns of Emigrant and surviving the stampede on WaMu, I don’t think I’d like to repeat that twice within a year. Stuff would make me superstitious about rate chasing..
What are the “safety concerns” that you’ve mentioned concerning Emi. Dir. ? thanks
don’t forget to keep their info for tax purposes next year. Don’t want to get snagged for dollars of interest!
That was pretty easy to close you savings account. I had horrible trouble trying to close my account at Bank of America a while back and will never do business with them again. That sounds really scary that they have safety concerns about the bank.
Oh god, I still have nightmares from trying to close my Bank of America account.
And I’ve also heard of some people trying to close it and then afterward getting hit with an “Insufficient Funds Fee”
its wierd, but I can still log into my emigrant direct account. Its been a month since I cancelled and I received the same “sorry to lose you as a valued customer” e-mail.
Yeah, I had the same issue so I emailed them. They say they keep access to the account open so that you can download statements and the 1099. But they said they removed the link to your other accounts.
And that if you want to remove access to their site, you have to contact them again.
I don’t mind being able to login to Emigrant Direct once my account with them is closed. That seems useful, thoughtful even. I do mind seeing my externally linked accounts still sitting there. I am working with ED to try to make those go away. There is no reason to display external accounts if I am not currently doing business with ED. It feels like a security issue.
Thanks, Jim. Second easiest account I ever closed. The easiest was ING. After withdrawing the entire balance to an external account, a button appeared that just said “Close Account.” I clicked that and it was done.