Pragmatic Finance

USAA is a military affiliated financial services organization whose trademark has been one of if not the lowest auto insurance available. They define military affiliation as someone who is currently serving or retired from the military as well as their children and spouses. You can also get membership by being the spouse or child of a current or former member. While their insurance is only available to those with a military affiliation, their banking has been available to anyone. It appears, though, that they are no longer going to offer banking services to people who don’t fit these categories after June 30th. People who are already members are supposed to be grandfathered in. So if you’re not already a member with an account, don’t have a military affiliation, and would like to use their banking services this could be your last chance for a relationship with USAA.

I have been using USAA’s banking services for a couple of months now and it is great. Some of the benefits are free checking and savings with no minimums, free checks for the life of the account, refunds up for atms up $15 per month, and quickpost. Quickpost is a service where you can send a deposit via UPS for free and the money will post to your account within one business day, no charge. Although I used to think this wasn’t too useful, I recently was paid with a check in a town where I didn’t have any banks that I had accounts with. It saved me the trouble of opening a new account and transferring the money later. USAA only has one brick and mortar bank in San Antonio so this might be very useful to someone who would use it as their main bank.

I haven’t looked at how long it takes to ach push money to another account, but when I have pulled money in the past it has shown up immediately. If you have ever used HSBC’s transfer service this is quite a shock

They also have a performance first savings account, I presume to compete in the online savings arena. However, it’s tiered and ranges from 4.51% to 4.88% as of the date of this post. This is probably the only thing keeping me from using them as my primary bank, as I wouldn’t qualify for the higher rate. If USAA would just raise the rates on this to near the top…

Oh, and I have to say that USAA has the best customer service I have ever encountered. I have spoken on the phone to them several times about banking and insurance, and each time they were extremely friendly and knowledgeable and almost no wait time on hold, even when they had to transfer me to another agent to answer a question. I was transferred with in about 3 seconds. There is a ton of more information in a post fittingly titled, The Ultimate USAA Bank Thread over at Fatwallet. Although some have become concerned recently by some of the changes, such as the membership limitation and changes to ach limits, overall they have an extremely good reputation.