Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

I pulled everything together over the last few days, and when I head out this morning, I will be mailing TIAA-CREF an envelope containing lots of paperwork and a check. That will move the IRA I opened in haste last April from my bank to them, and add money for tax year 2007. The investment/IRA advisor at TIAA-CREF, who I talked to again yesterday, made a note on my account and will be keeping an eye on it and let me know if there's anything missing or awry.

Sorting this out required some annoying interactions with the bank. The first was just a friendly waste of time, going in and being told no, I had to wait until after the CD I had stashed the money in matured before I could give the "don't roll it over" instruction. My friendly banker (I've talked to her before, and she is friendly and helpful) also said I didn't need to come in to the branch, I could call either the branch or the 800 number on the "your CD is maturing" letter. Tuesday morning, I called the 800 number. I got someone who told me that he couldn't do this for me, it had to be in writing. And did so in such a way that I asked him "well, what can you do?" I had already said I didn't want him to close my account, just move the money from a CD to their money market while I decided what to do next. [Closing the account will be handled separately, but I didn't tell him that; he may have guessed.] He said something about handling paperwork, and I asked why they had him answering phones. A moment's more annoyance, and a new voice cut in. She explained she was a supervisor, and said that if I had access to a fax machine, we could do it that way. She gave me their fax number and instructions on what to include in the fax. I thanked her, opened a word processor file, and they had a fax 20 minutes later. [Worst case, she lied to me, and I'll move the money to TIAA-CREF six months from now.]

This is going to TIAA-CREF because I have pension money there already, from when I worked at ACM, and it's a good deal if you're eligible (in terms of fees and the rate of return they've been managing). Eligibility is a bit complicated, but it includes anyone who works at an institution where they offer a pension plan; anyone who works at an eligible institution (nonprofit colleges adn universities, elementary and secondary schools, government entities, teaching hospitals, and museums are listed as examples); anyone who already has a retirement plan with them (that's my eligibility); or the spouse or domestic partner of anyone in one of the above groups. The limits on that are legal and historical, and connected to their non-profit status (my pension plan is at a .org domain); they're pretty clearly casting the net as widely as Congress will let them.

This morning, cattitude and I went to a local bank to open a joint checking account to use for some of the household bills. We then had to go back with more paperwork, because his photo ID isn't proof of address, and the bank wanted both. In the interim, a line had formed, so we spent longer waiting than we'd hoped, but the task is done. (This bank branch's weekend hours are 9-1 Saturday, and weekdays they open at 9 a.m. and never stay open past six, so a lot of people are stuck with that four-hour window if they want to talk to a teller, let alone open an account.)

We can't use it quite yet: we opened the account with a check, and they're taking their own sweet time for it to clear. This isn't something urgent: the joint account is a useful thing we'd talked about for a while, not a necessity of our lives or household management. Once it's fully functional, we'll make arrangements to put money in it regularly (probably involving direct deposit), and write a few checks on it every month (rent and utilities). We deliberately opened the account at a bank other than the ones our existing accounts are at, to increase flexibility in case one or more banks is unreachable for a day or three (the entire ATM network is relatively robust but, like the Internet, one of the ways it achieves that is by continuing to function if a particular bank goes offline).

Most of our money will be staying where it is now, in various places where it's in my name or his, but not both.