An open letter to Wells Fargo and anyone else who cares:

Dear Wells Fargo,

I have been banking with you for six years.  My husband has been with you since the mid-90s.  When we bought our house and consolidated our finances, we decided to merge my bank accounts with his and move everything to your bank (in hindsight, I wish we had moved him to my bank instead, but you know what they say about hindsight).  We added my name to his checking account, and opened a joint credit card through Wells Fargo.  Our Heloc is also through your bank, and has been ever since we bought our house.  Three years ago, we incorporated our business and opened a business checking account, along with a corporate credit card for each of us.  Last month we opened a corporate money market savings account.

Our high-yield savings account is not with Wells Fargo, because as far as I know you do not offer one.  And our HSA and IRAs are with investment brokerage firms.  But all of our other banking is done with your bank, and has been for a long time.  We have a perfect record with you and with every other bank/lender/financial institution we’ve ever done business with.

Last Sunday, we got an email from a vendor we use for our business, letting us know that an automatic payment had been declined.   I called the 24 hour number on the back of my corporate credit card to find out what was up.  I was informed by a very nice employee that our credit cards had been closed as of January 20th.  Well that’s lovely – any particular reason why?  The gentleman told me that they were closed because of a report from Experian.  But I would have to call back the next morning to talk to someone during normal business hours to get more information.   That doesn’t make for a particularly good evening.

We called the next morning and talked to another rep who told us that the reason the cards were closed was because of low usage on the accounts.  To back up a bit, when we opened the credit cards, we told the business banking rep at our local Wells Fargo that we would only be spending about $300 – $500/month on our cards.  But we were given accounts with $10,000 credit limits.  True to our word, we’ve put approximately $400/month on the cards over the last three years.  We always pay the balance in full, and have never paid any fees or interest on our corporate credit cards.  But the cards are essential to our business.  All of the charges are automatic, recurring bills from vendors for services that we cannot operate without.

So on Monday morning we were told that our cards were closed because of low usage.  We asked to speak to a supervisor and were told that one would call us back.  But that never happened.  The next day, I called back to try to get a supervisor on the phone.  The person I spoke with on Tuesday told me that our cards were closed because of BOTH low usage and a report from Experian that indicated (according to Wells Fargo) that the balances on our personal credit cards were too high and that the amount of time our credit had been active was too short.

I spent 45 minutes on the phone with two people on Tuesday morning trying to figure out what was going on.  Conveniently enough, I had copies of our credit reports and credit scores from Experian and TransUnion from the same week that Wells Fargo had apparently gotten their report from Experian.  According to the credit scores I paid for when I got our credit reports, my husband’s credit is better than 93% of Americans, and mine is better than 78%.  So it would seem that you must be closing an awful lot of accounts. There’s not much we can do about the length of time our credit has been active (we haven’t closed any accounts recently), and it’s been active now for three years longer than it had been when you gave us $20,000 in credit (even though we told you we only needed about $500).  I discussed with the rep the fact that we don’t carry balances on any credit cards (confirmed by the credit reports), and that we charge a small fraction of the limit on our personal Wells Fargo card and AmEx each month, and pay off the balances in full.  She didn’t know what to say other than that she was sorry.  As for the low usage factor, no one at Wells Fargo was able to tell me what your requirement is for usage.  That sure does make it hard to adhere to, now doesn’t it?

The reps we spoke with earlier this week told us that notification was sent to us on January 20th, informing us about the accounts being closed.  Today is the 29th, and we haven’t received anything yet.  Did you send the letters on one of your horse-drawn wagons?  Just curious.

So, you want to know what I think?  About three weeks ago, I called to see if we could have our cards set up with automatic payment from our Wells Fargo corporate checking account.  Since we always pay the balance in full anyway, I figured it would make my life easier if I didn’t have to write checks from the account each month, and could just have the balances paid on the due dates.  Ironically, we got our credit card bills on Tuesday, and notification was included with the statements telling us that the balance would be deducted from our corporate checking account on the due date.  So now Wells Fargo is well aware that we will never be interest-paying clients.  We never have been, although I suppose the possibility was always there.  Until we set our accounts to be automatically paid in full each month.

Once you knew that we would never be interest-paying or fee-paying clients, you decided to get rid of us.  But you did it in a way that we can never fight.  Your minimum usage requirement is supposedly a corporate secret.  And while the information contained in credit reports is objective and can be contested (ours is all accurate), a company’s use of that data is subjective, and we can’t argue with how you interpret a credit report.

I truly felt sorry for the Wells Fargo reps I spoke with earlier this week.  They seemed resigned to having a pretty rough time of it right now.  I asked them if this was happening to a lot of clients, and they both said yes.  I was very upset, but I was restrained and apologized to the reps for being upset.  I’m guessing that a lot of your clients weren’t so polite.

The most frustrating part of all this is the $25 billion in tax dollars that Wells Fargo received in the banking bailout.  You’re welcome.

J. Money over at Budgets Are Sexy has put together a great list of crazy jobs that we frugal folk have held over the years.  My days as a dishroom girl in a dorm cafeteria are chronicled, along with plenty of other good jobs that will either make you grateful for your 9 – 5 or make you want to think outside the box and find creative employment.  One of my friends had a job a few years ago that involved finding dead sheep for the Division of Wildlife.  She lives in a rural mountain area, and when bears kill sheep, the ranchers are entitled to a payment from the DOW.  But they were having problems with excessive claims, so they hired my friend to verify that bears had killed the sheep in question.  Ranchers would find the dead sheep, report them to the DOW with GPS coordinates.  Then my friend would head out with her GPS, trekking over the mountains to find the dead sheep and verify that they had been killed by bears (yes, she had to go through a class to learn how to determine if a sheep had been killed by a bear).  I think she got $150 per sheep, and basically got paid to go hiking, although there was quite a bit of bushwacking involved.  Apparently bears don’t stick to the hiking trails.

The following is a guest post from Trisha Wagner, discussing how our financial habits impact our children.  I grew up in a family where DIY, frugality, conservation, and making do were virtues.  There was always money available for things that were truly necessary, but that was because my parents did such a good job of not wasting money on things that weren’t really necessary.  My husband and I consider frugality to be a virtue regardless of inccome.  We are  passing that value on to our son by avoiding needless consumerism, buying nearly everything second-hand, and partaking in lots of free entertainment (hiking instead of going to the movies, for example).  I’m grateful to my parents for the frugal nature and desire to save that they instilled in me.  It has helped immensely over the years when money has been tight.  I hope that one day our son will also be grateful for the frugal values that we’re passing on to him.  As you read through Trisha’s article, think about your own children, and what sort of adults you want them to become.  Nobody sets out to deliberately create a spoiled, financially illiterate child.  But sometimes parents with the best of intentions go down that path out of what they think is love.  The rought economic times we’re going through are difficult, no question about that.  But a child raised in a home where money is tight but well managed will have a better start in life than a child who is raised in a home where money is plentiful and no request is ever denied, or one raised in a home where the family lives beyond their means.  Thanks for such a timely article, Trisha!

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Upper to middle class parents may have more issues during the current economic climate than just dealing with tightening the purse-strings to make it through harder times. Talking to your kids about why there is less money for indulgences may be just as large an issue to contend with, especially if finances have never been an issue before. Financial responsibility is something we learn at home long before we take our first class on economy. Many families will learn this the hard way by failing to avoid these common pitfalls in raising your children to be respectful of finances.

• Indulging your children’s every wish and whim. While families with less disposable income teach this lesson early, families that have the means to purchase whatever it is that Johnny or Suzie want sometimes have difficulty in saying no. After all, why deprive your child something that he or she wants when you have the ability to provide it? Stated simply- if you child never wants for anything, they can never truly learn how to appreciate the things they have. Just because you are able to buy whatever it is they want, does not mean you should. You will be doing yourself and your kids a favor by learning when to say no to things they simply do not need. If you don’t start this at a young age, do not expect it to get easier as they grow. As your child matures it is your responsibility as a parent to teach them that it is a big world out there and things will not always happen as they wish.

• Not providing your child guidance on how to manage money. This mistake can have a severe impact on your child when he/she is old enough to obtain credit cards or start living out on their own. If you provide your child with an allowance without making them responsible for contributing to their own expenses you are teaching them that money is for buying fun things only. While it is important to give your teen some freedom in learning how to spend or save, it is recommended you make them financially responsible for some of their own expenses as well. After all, when they get in the real world, they will not get their entire salary to spend on whatever it is they fancy. Money must be budgeted to pay for expenses, purchasing necessities and of course savings for a rainy day. It is much easier to learn these lessons as a teen and young adult BEFORE entering the real world where mistakes can be costly.

• Failing to make kids work for their money. When you child is old enough to need or want an allowance they are certainly old enough to contribute something to earn it. Even small children can learn the value of money by having simple chores such as keeping their room clean or helping mom or dad around the house. It is human nature to take for granted what is received without having to sacrifice or work for the end result. Unless you are able to leave a sizable trust for your children in which they will never have to work for a living, it is best to teach them at a young age that nothing in life is free.

While it is admirable to want to provide for your family’s every need, in some cases you are doing more harm than good by making the high life too easy. By teaching your kids real life lessons about money and money management you are preparing them to deal with the reality of life as an adult and that lesson is priceless.

Trisha Wagner is a freelance writer for DepositAccounts.com, where you can compare rates from dozens of banks in one place. Trisha writes regularly on the topics of personal finance and saving money.

For years, we’ve had fogged windows.  The windows in our living room were so fogged that I could have danced the polka in my underwear with the curtains open and nobody would have noticed.  Last summer when we painted our house ourselves (plus a little help from my family) we told ourselves that we would use some of the money we saved by doing out own painting to get the living room windows replaced.  But we never did, because we were sure it would be a very expensive project.

Over the last several months, we noticed that the windows in our kitchen were starting to get badly fogged aswell.  The windows in the rest of the house were replaced by the previous owners, but the living room and kitchen windows were original to the house.  The seals on the double-paned glass had given out, and moisture was gathering between the panes.  It spoils the view and makes cleaning the windows a particularly un-rewarding task.

We decided to bite the bullet and get them replaced, but before we made arrangements to get new windows, we did a little searching around on Google.  And we found that fogged double paned glass can be replaced without replacing the whole window.  Jackpot! 

Normally we’re big fans of do-it-yourself.  But in this case, I’m glad we left the job to a professional.  The window guy had all sorts of fancy tools and it still took him about six hours to replace five windows.  Despite all his skill and tools, one of them broke as he was installing it, and he had to come back today to finish the job.

Our windows look fantastic now.  We have clear views, no fog, and improved insulation values in our windows (apparently when the seal gives out on double paned glass, the R value drops).  The grand total to have five double-paned windows installed was $624 (and they come with a ten year warranty against fogging).  Compared with the cost of having five complete, custom-sized windows installed, we feel like we did pretty well.  We’ve been talking about fixing our fogged windows for years, and it’s nice to finally have it done.

Thought I’d share a picture of the fabulous tomatoes we ate this evening.  Fresh from our hydroponic garden in the crawlspace, they tasted like tomatoes you get in July.  There were many more ready to pick, but I stopped when the bowl started to overflow. 

Local, fresh, and always in-season.  Our hydroponic garden is working out even better than we had hoped.  We harvest greens every day (kale, collards, swiss chard, mustard), along with peppers and tomatoes every few days.  We’re on our second crop of greens, as most of the plants we put in last August ran their course after a few months.  The current crop is still going strong, but we’ve started some new seedlings to replace a few of the plants that are showing signs of bolting.  The tomatoes and peppers are still the original plants.  We’ve read that tomato plants can grow for 18 months, so I think we’ll get plenty more tomatoes from this crop.

Our dishwasher may have died, but I’m finding ways to give its parts a new life.  I’m a scrapbooker, and I love pens.  I do a lot of writing on my pages, and have quite a few pens.  Until today, they lived in a drawer, all jumbled together.  Now they are neatly organized in the cutlery holder from our old dishwasher.  It’s perfect – portable, organized, and big enough for all my pens with room to spare:

Here’s some good stuff I found around the blogosphere this week:

At Green And Crunchy, they are hibernating and making some amazing food.  Their pictures look like something from a food magazine.  I was inspired by their creations, and today I made bean burgers from scratch (with beans I cooked in the sun oven) and buns to go with them.

The Thrifty Chicks have a wonderful article about children and thrift stores.  I grew up shopping at yard sales, and I remember looking forward to it all week.  We would get the newspaper, plan our route, and spend all of Saturday morning at yard sales.  When I was in high school, we took a family vacation to a big city several hours from our home.  It turned out to be very touristy, and everything was expensive.  So on a whim, my parents stopped at a Goodwill.  We discovered that the city had several great thrift stores, and spent the rest of our vacation happily hunting for bargains.  After that we would return every summer for our thrift store vacation.  We never did visit the tourist traps – the whole family had so much fun in the thrift stores that there was no need for anything else. 

In the Frugal Blog Network,

Tight Fisted Miser has a compilation of his best posts from 2008 – check them out if you missed them the first time.

Almost Frugal is saving for retirement with a budget that is already so tight it squeaks.  A few years ago, we were working to pay off debt and didn’t have an emergency fund.  We set up an online account and put $100/month into it.  The payments went in automatically, and after a few raids early in the process, we managed to stop dipping into it 2 years ago.  It’s tough to build savings when you’re paying off debt at the same time, but the psychological boost is considerable, and I wish Kelly and her family all the best.

Frugal Zeitgeist did a little shopping.  I would say $1.09 over-budget is pretty darn good.  Well done, FZ!

Frugal Duchess has the scoop on how to watch the inauguration for free, in the comfort of your own home.  As much as I’d love to be at such an historic event, I think I’ll enjoy it more on my couch.

Not Made Of Money has written about paying down the mortgage early.  This is our number one financial goal at the moment.  We cleared out the rest of our debt in 2007, and we’ve ramped up our mortgage repayment schedule.  Even if we end up moving, we do not want to be making mortgage payments for the next 20 or 30 years. 

Last spring when we remodeled our kitchen, we bought a dishwasher that we found on Craigs List for $100.  It was about six years old, and the retail price was $600.  We replaced a 21 year old dishwasher that was loud and ugly and rusty but still working.  Our new (to us) dishwasher was amazingly quiet, very stylish, and worked great – until this week.  On Wednesday evening, I turned it on and nothing happened.  I pushed a few buttons and thought I smelled smoke, so I shut it off and went to bed.  My parents were planning to visit us on Thursday, and I wanted to get their opinion on what might be wrong.

When they got here, we pulled the dishwasher out and it took my dad about 8 minutes to find a very fried part of motor.  Dang it.  We briefly thought about trying to get a new motor, but since we didn’t know what had caused the motor to burn out in the first place, we didn’t want to put a new motor in and have it burn out again.

Since time was of the essence (we had to shut off the main water line to the house while the dishwasher was connected) we decided to go to Home Depot and just buy a new dishwasher.  Our fridge and stove are white, so we wanted a white dishwasher.  There wasn’t a lot of decision making to do, as there was a grand total of one white dishwasher in stock at our Home Depot.  We forked over $350 and brought it home.  Thanks to my parents, it’s now installed in our kitchen and working perfectly.

I don’t like buying anything new when there’s an option to buy used.  But convenience won out this time.  And it is nice to have a warranty on our new dishwasher.

We’re focusing on living very frugally in order to have money saved for a down payment if we decide to go ahead with our idea of buying another house.  And it would have been nice to be able to put that $350 into our house fund instead of buying a dishwasher.  (We don’t consider a dishwasher to be an emergency, so we’re using money that would have been allocated to our down payment fund rather than emergency fund money.  We’d rather delay our house purchase than deplete our emergency fund.)  But situations like this remind me of how glad I am that we worked so hard to get rid of our non-mortgage debt over the last several years and that we live below our means.  It’s a bummer to have to take a chunk out of the money that we’ll put into our house fund this month.  But it would be a much bigger bummer if we were also struggling to pay off consumer debt at the same time (we did have a few of those sort of situations arise when we were working to pay off debt, and they were even less fun then).

If you’re focused on off debt, I promise that the result is worth it.  Appliances will give out, emergencies will crop up, unexpected expenses will always show up when you have much better plans for your money.  By focusing on needs rather than wants, living below your means, and setting aside money during times when you don’t have unexpected expenses, life becomes a little easier when the unexpected expenses show up.

I got an email this week about National Thrift Week, which I’ll admit I had never heard of until I read the email and checked out the Bring Back Thrift Week website.  Apparently it was a strong tradition that lasted for half of the last century, but faded into history with the latter part of the 20th century.

My family has always been thrifty.  I grew up on a farm in the middle of nowhere.  We shopped at yardsales, ate homecooked meals, and I learned to drive on the same two cars that my parents had from the time I was a very small child (they still had those cars until about five years ago).  So thrifty ways are pretty much second nature to me. 

But I think that a lot of people who haven’t always been thrifty are heading in that direction now.  The rough economic waters are taking a toll on everyone, and for some, the obvious answer is to focus on spending less money and finding creative ways to enjoy life while sticking to a budget. 

I think that Thrift Week is a great idea.  A week of focusing on spending quality time rather than money, giving thanks for what you do have instead of coveting what you don’t have, and thinking of ways to fix, reuse, and otherwise make do that don’t involve mindless consumerism.

Check out the website.  There’s even a thrifty ideas essay contest (it’s limited to 50 word entries.  Even if you don’t think of yourself as a writer, you can put together 50 words, and you just might win a $100 savings bond for your efforts).

Thrift Week starts on Saturday, so get ready.  I think we’ll do our grocery shopping on Friday, and then my goal will be for us to have at least 6 no-spending days out of the 8 days of Thrift Week (they threw in an extra day for fun).  Now’s a great time to set some thrifty goals for next week.  Of course it’s even better if you can keep them going all year, but having a week dedicated to thrifty living is a great start.

FiLife is a personal finance site that is partnered with the Wall Street Journal.  Susie Bafico from FiLife interviewed me earlier this month and has posted the interview on the site’s profile section.  Head over there and see if you learn anything about me that you didn’t already know.  Susie has interviewed several bloggers.  Scan through her articles and you’ll probably come across interviews with other bloggers you recognize.

In the Frugal Blog Network,

Tight Fisted Miser has some radical ways for the US government to raise money.  I’m a big fan of his ideas, even though he notes that he’s not entirely serious.  The first three make perfect sense: legalizing and taxing vices that people already do anyway would be a good revenue generator for the government and would reduce the amount of money that has to be spent by the justice system.

Almost Frugal has a great post about gifts for new parents.  As a new parent myself, I love her ideas.

Not Made Of Money has some ideas for games to teach kids about money.  As parents, teaching our son about finances will be right up there with the birds and the bees.

Frugal Zeitgeist writes about the demise of her shredder.  We had a super-cheap shredder that we bought years ago when we started our business.  it cut strips about half an inch wide (not really, but close) and could only handle one sheet at a time.  A few weeks ago, we used a gift card and bought a new shredder that seems to work like magic (you can’t piece the shreds back together and read what was on the paper!!)

Frugal Duchess writes about using both sides of a sheet of paper.  We keep things as paperless as possible around here, but mail still rolls in.  I reuse envelopes for grocery lists and to-do lists.  I keep a box on the counter where I open the mail.  Everything to be shredded goes in the shredder right away, but everything else goes in the box.  Then I can use it as scratch paper as needed, and dump it in the recycling container in the garage once a week or so.

As a follow up to the post I wrote a few days ago about the new consumer protection laws and the possibility that thrift stores would have to stop selling children’s items, I was happy to come across this article tonight.  Looks like second hand stores will be ok.  Now we just have to make sure that the same is true for mom and pop businesses that make clothing and toys for kids… call your congressional reps!

And now for my two cents on credit scores.  Since we’re considering buying another house, we decided to take a peek at our credit scores.  We get our credit reports every six months or so, but have never paid to see our credit scores until now.  We went to the annual credit report site and picked Experian.  Credit scores were $5.95 each, and the credit report is free (we normally just get the free report).  We got my husband’s score first, and it was great.  It put him in the “super prime” category, which is what Experian calls their best credit scores.  No surprises there.  Then we pulled my credit report, and I was in their “prime plus” category.  I was two points below the cutoff for super prime, and my credit score with them is still considered very good.  But I’m a bit of a perfectionist, and when there’s a super prime option out there, I don’t want to be prime plus (pout).  My husband, who is very good at finding humor in just about any situation, thought it was quite funny that I (Miss Frugal Babe, and household money czar) somehow had a lower credit score than he did.

Just about all of our accounts have been joint for at least the last six years.  But I’ve never had a car loan, and he had one when we met.  He hasn’t had a car loan since 2002, but it does still show up on his credit report, and I’m sure that’s giving his score a bit of a boost.

But here’s the part that gets me.  Experian gave me a list of things that are lowering my score.  Of course time was a factor (when will this not be the case?  I’ve been in their files since 1997).  But the number one reason they listed was “The average loan amount across open, recently reported real estate accounts, such as a mortgage, is too low. Having low loan amounts has a negative impact on your credit score.” Are you kidding me??!  After the mortgage debacle that has ripped through the American economy over the last year or so, that is still considered a valid reason for a credit score to be lowered?  Maybe someone should let them know that people are defaulting on mortgages all across the country right now, and a big reason is that mortgage lenders approved people for loans that were too big (and used creative financing to seal the deal).

Ugh.  I checked my report closely, and everything is in order.  And I gotta say, I’d rather have a credit score that is two points below what Experian considers “super prime” than have a higher score and a higher mortgage balance.  Mostly I’m just amazed that any credit reporting agency is still encouraging bigger mortgages right now, and penalizing for smaller ones, considering the state of the mortgage industry.

Have any of you ever paid to see your credit score?  Ever been surprised by what you saw, or by the explanations given?