craig10x said:mariojm said:Don't have an account there myself but there's been a thread and quite a bit of buzz around it a few months ago:

City National Bank of Taylor
4.03% APY (25,000 max)
No minimum
No monthly service charge
Unlimited check writing
Free bill pay
Automatic ATM fee refunds
Free bank to bank transfers

Requires direct deposit and (here's the annoying part) 10 POS charges on debit card per month

You do need to have direct deposit to the Reward Checking with CNBT to get the free bill pay, but Unlimited ATM Rebates and no min balance requirement is standard with Reward Checking....However, if you don't do the 10 debit card transactions every month, you get 0% interest. If you link Reward Savings to it, on that account you do get 4.39% (with no min balance needed) which is great, and for that account the debit card transactions does not apply, so you do get the interest for that one...

I banked with them for a while...they are pretty good...but you have to accept electronic statements, they won't send paper statements for these 2 particular accounts... Best Feature with that set up is the Unlimited Rebates on Checking and the great interest rate on the Savings.....

IMO best feature is that Taylor has very good BBQ!

asdf83 said:Regering to presidential:

"End of August, they will have ability to add external accounts."

what does this mean and how do you know its happening?

I called presidential and confirmed all the details of the account, and found this out from them.

Corrected Meadows CU quick summary:

The interest rate goes up to 4.25% on July 1.

There is no limit on number of ACH transfers per month, just a dollar limit.

Also the line about $5000 minimum balance to get free services is redundant, since you would not want this account without
a $5000 minimum balance since it pays NO INTEREST for the whole month in which your balance drops below $5000 even for 1 day
and moreover many services (eg ACH transfers) are not available at all while your balance is below $5000.

This thread is great : how do we request that it be made sticky ?

I suggest that instead of alerting moderators, we first assemble more evidence of the importance of this thread, i.e. give it some time to develop. OP, may I suggest you give the opening statement of your post a slightly different twist - it sounds like we're doing this thread in protest of the already existing thread, but really I think we should use the opportunity to give it a reason to stand alone. Think of some good reasons why checking accounts may be worth discussing separately from savings accounts other than someone's "rules."

opmnxtc, very minor complaint on this great thread. It looks like Everbank is ranked first, but this only due to 3 month intro rate. I think Presidential's non-promo rate should get top billing. I list the temporary rate, but not rank by it.

Well, makeinu, i'm not sure if paypal or other ACH deposits would "simulate" direct deposit, at CNBT...i actually did have my pension check deposited into the account every month (otherwise you get socked with a $5.95 per month charge for bill pay)...you could experiment...but at the risk of getting hit with the fee (unless you could get them to "reverse" it). They give you a 1 month "grace" period to get it set up....

They do have external bank ach service (much like USAA) but i hadn't used it when i had the accounts, so not sure how fast it would be....

Perhaps someone who has the Reward Checking with CNBT, and "simulates" direct deposit, could confirm that it works?

I didn't want to do the 10 Debit card transactions each month, so i had gotten 0% interest in that account (but unlimited surcharge rebates) and got the great interest rate from the Reward Savings which was linked to it....

Went with CNBT because I don't like having to maintain a minimum balance on a checking account, and the ~0.5% APY difference from Presidential is okay since I don't usually put much in my checking accounts anyway. The "10 POS charges on debit card per month" requirement doesn't bother me much since I can simply charge $0.01 ten times via comcast.com, with a software robot automating the clicks. I got a hard pull on Equifax BTW.

i like this thread though it seems underused. corus' rates needs to be bumped up to 5.10% for accts over 100k.