Congrats Mike. You did what I've been putting off - only for the reason that snail mail now turns my nose up :) Yet I'm walking away from money...go figure!

my "letter" never arrived...i got my statement for 9/30 first. So by the time I called about the missing letter the rep told me all I needed was my acct number..which i had on the statement...and I could setup online access (by creating a whole new acct...gotta love that extra step!)

Pesky process...but once it's done, its nice to have the higher rate.

yep I hate that part too. If huge banks like ING can make it painless, why can't they? But Emigrant strikes me as an old-school bank trying to catch up to the new age as fast as they can, but being extra careful at the same time.

michael, the short answer to your transfer question is to set up ED as a linked account inside ING. More details in my reply to your comment here

(thanks to flexo and jonathan)

it took me a looong time to get registered with emigrant direct. I had to contact their support a couple times over the course of weeks. It was pretty confusing. The web interface is maneagable once you do get in though. I'm happy with it so far.

I had a problem with ING. I had an arrangement with a third party to debit my ING account. We had a little problem getting in sync and they bounced 3 ach debits. We finally got it together and all was going fine. I just got an email that ING closed my accounts and sent the money to my linked checking account. Never once did they contact me to either warn me or find out what was going on. They don’t care that I now have to stop the “now running right” ACH debits before they try to hit the account. My call to customer service resulted in a snotty attitude from the guy. All-in-all I am really unhappy with the human service. The system worked fine but don’t make a mistake or your kicked to the curb.

On the bright side it made me look for something else and now I am going to be paid more for my moneyJ

It took me over a week to open my account. It has taken me over fifteen days to transfer a fairly large sum of money into the account. I have lost over three weeks of interest. Emigrant kept trying to transfer the funds from an account that wasn't mine. I don't know what they were doing. The correct account was listed but when I tried to transfer money another acccount would show up. I talked to several people at emigrant that were very nice but did not follow through on their promises. The last person told me he would get it straigth and let me know somthing that afternoon. I never heard from him again. I tried to transfer again and this time I think it has worked. At least I hope so. The money has been withdrawn from my bank and shows up in my account but is not available to me yet. It has been a nightmare but I hope the worst is over. The interest rate is great.