As everyone already knows, Washington Mutual’s operations were bought out by JP Morgan Chase. The move that ultimately helped take down WaMu faster was when panicked depositors withdrew more than $16 billion in a 10 day period. Personally I believe a lot of people who withdrew money were idiots in that their money was FDIC insured up to $100k. WaMu may or may not have failed eventually but irrationality helped seal WaMu’s fate.

The #1 reason I’ll miss WaMu is their ESPN Rewards credit card. I’m not big on earning rewards on the card but you did get to see your FICO score for free regularly. That was probably the biggest perk of having that card as a myfico.com ScoreWatch subscription is $8.95 per month or $107.40 annually.

WaMu also offered free checks for life and free outgoing wire transfers worldwide. I hardly ever use paper checks these days or wire transfers but it’s nice to know that you can have them for free.

JPMorgan Chase expects to consolidate everything by the end of 2010. I already have 4 Chase credit cards. Hopefully when my cards get re-branded the features stay the same. I’ll miss checking my FICO score for free regularly.

Lyndsey, a volunteer who works on various lender engagement initiatives for Kiva, contacted me recently to inform me about Kiva being back in the top 5 for the American Express Members Project competition for the $1.5 million dollar grand prize. They moved from the #8 spot to the #4 spot overnight because of an e-mail they’re sending out to all the lenders. Below is a short 15 second video that was made specifically for the competition.

The voting for this round goes until September 29th (TOMORROW!) and the final round goes until October 13th witht he winner announced October 14th. Every $1 donated to Kiva’s operational expenses has led to $8 in loans so Kiva winning this prize could help facilitate $12M of additional loans to 24,000 entrepeneurs.

Head on over to the American Express Members Project page for Kiva and place your vote today!

I logged into ING this morning and noticed at the bottom of the screen there was an option to link your ING Direct accounts to your Sharebuilder accounts. All it takes is inputting your username and password.

Now whenever you log into ING Direct you’ll see the balances of your Sharebuilder portfolios and if you click on one of your Sharebuilder accounts it’ll automatically log you in a new window. Funds transferred between ING Direct accounts and Sharebuilder accounts are now instantaneous.

It’s about time they integrated considering ING Direct bought Sharebuilder quite awhile ago.

So a woman tried to rob the Roslyn Savings Bank with a threatening note demanding cash or she’s open fire. The teller asked the robber if they were serious and apparently they panicked enough to run off. link

Seriously?

JPMorgan is acquiring WaMu but the offer for 5% 12 month CDs is still on the main page of WaMu.com. If JPMorgan decides to not honor the rate at some point in the future you’re allowed to withdraw your money without penalty.

Minimum to open an online CD is $1,000.

link

10,000 Membership Reward points after first purchase which is equivalent to a $100 gift card.

First year is fee-free. $125 after first year.

link

WaMu upped the rate for their online savings account to 4% APY. This is 1% higher than what ING Direct currently offers.

If you’re worried about WaMu failing just keep your under $100,000 and you’ll be FDIC insured.

savings account link

I actually don’t have a WaMu bank account yet and will consider opening a free checking account and online savings.

Commerce Bank offers a free coin counting machine that I recently decided to try out. This is opposed to Coinstar machines which typically charge a 9% fee to count your coins.

Commerce Bank prides itself on being a extremely customer service oriented bank. They were open until 8 pm the day I went and the coin counting is free even to non customers. After the machine is done counting it prints out a reciept and you just hand it to the teller and they’ll give you the appropriate amount.

So how exactly are we “testing” Commerce Bank’s coin counting machine? Me and my crack team of interns counted all the coins in the picture below by hand. The hand counted result would then be compared to the result given by the Commerce Bank machine.

Hand counted result: $60.38
Machine counted result: $60.43

Wait! How is the machine result 5 cents higher? Possible explanations:

• The hand count was undercounted by 5 cents.
• There was 5 cents stuck in the machine that was freed by our stream of coins.
• The machine overcounted by 5 cents.

We’ll never know the true reason but it’s great to know the margin of error is slim to none on this field test. Commerce Bank for the win!