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July 17, 2005
Working around the $5,000 per day withdrawal limit
A bus wrecked my car a couple of weekends ago and we bought another used car. It's a Subaru Outback and it's a big step up from the smashed up Corolla. Now we can actually put the mountain bikes on top of the bike rack where they belong instead of taking off both wheels and the seats to try to squeeze them into the back seat of the Corolla, which took about 15 minutes.
The owner wanted a cashier's check or money order - not a personal check and not cash. That was understandable. So the day before making the purchase, I went to the bank to get a cashier's check. However, I only had $10 in my Washington Mutual account and was trying to cash a personal check for $8,700 (for the car) and convert that into a cashier's check. The teller said they'd need to place an eleven business day hold on the check.
The teller said Washington Mutual would only make up to $5,000 available immediately. So I needed to come up with another $3,700 in cash to deposit into my WaMu account that would be available right away.
You can get $50 cash back at Safeway, Ralph's, Vons, and a whole bunch of other stores when you use your Discover card, so my immediate thought was that I just needed to make 74 trips to Safeway and I'd have my $3,700. However, I was trying to get this taken care of on my lunch break with only my bike as transportation and I decided that would be Plan "D".
Plan "B" was to go to Bank of America, where I had recently opened an account to get the $100 sign up money, get a cashier's check there for the $3,700, and come back to WaMu. (Plan "C" was to call up the Subaru owner and ask them if they'd consider taking a personal check for $3,700, but somehow, I didn't think she'd go for it). When I told Plan B to the WaMu teller, he just said, "Why don't you just write another check for $3,700?"
He offered to "simulate" (whatever that means) the transaction to see if it would go through. If it wouldn't, I could go for Plan B. So I wrote another check. It went through. I got the cashier's check and left pretty happy with WaMu.
So you can get more than $5,000 in cash from WaMu by writing personal checks without having to wait for the checks to clear in eleven business days I don't know how much I could've gotten in total, but next time we go to Vegas, I'll bring a big fat checkbook and find out (oh wait - we only play the 50 cent craps at Casino Royale - never mind).
When I called customer service that night to find out how much I could've gotten, the rep (who sounded about 19 years old and pretty clueless) told me it depended on history of overdrafts, length of time the account is opened, and the manager's mood that day, but generally $5,000 is the limit. I guess it's only the limit per check, though.
Posted by brian at July 17, 2005 04:35 PM