Thank you for your recommendations, Ramit. I’m honored that you left a
comment on my blog! I was actually leaning toward ING for savings and B of
A for a local branch, but I’ll definitely have to check out Schwab. Thanks
for the lead!

(glad you liked the photo)

I love Washington Mutual for local checking. We’ve been with them for almost 13 years and haven’t had a problem that wasn’t resolved quickly.

We also use ING.

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I’d recommend:

1. PHYSICAL BANK
Wells Fargo, Bank of America, or WaMu for a basic checking account. You will hardly ever use this, but most online high-interest savings accounts require it, and once a year you may need to interact with a real teller.

2. ONLINE HIGH-INTEREST SAVINGS ACCOUNT
I recommend ING, which I use. Emigrant Direct and HSBC Direct are also pretty good. I just happen to use ING because it’s simple and it works — and they don’t send me 50 million mailers every day.

3. CHECKING
Schwab Investor Checking is the best. They send you prepaid envelopes to deposit checks (but you’ll be using automatic transfers for most of your money, right?), and they reimburse you for ANY ATM withdrawals. Plus, you earn interest.

Hope this helps.

I have dealt with many of the big banks and they are all a pain to deal with. I keep my savings with ING, but my checking and online billpaying is all done with my local credit union. Customer service is A1, lots of tellers, friendly, fees are much, much lower than the banks and the savings interest rates are higher (but not as high as online banks).

Good luck!