Why Wells Fargo May Just Be the Worst Bank Ever

Since we're moving to Colorado, we kind of figured that our current bank, First Hawaiian Bank, wouldn't have any branches there. You know, just a guess.

So after asking for some recommendations, it seems Wells Fargo has the most branches in the area. So I check out their website and hey cool you can apply for a checking account online -- This is important as we can't just casually fly from Honolulu to Denver to open a checking account, and we'd prefer to have the account already open so that our rent payment can be coming from that account.

My first step is I decide to call and ask if I can open a local checking account but use my Hawaii address (after all, we haven't moved yet and I don't know what our new address will be). Visiting the website, my first instinct is to email them. Ah, but, "You can only email us if you have an account with us!" Ok, well the 1-800 number should work right? I call it up and listen to the message and press 2... then press 3... then it says to continue I need to enter my account number. Weeeeell I don't have one, that's why I'm calling you. So I hang up, and start over, this time pressing 0 right off the bat to just speak to someone. Pressing 0 takes me back to the "enter your account number" question. Awesome. I can't call you to even ask a question about opening an account?

So I outsmart the phone system and open up Google, typing in "wells fargo 80027". HA! I beat you technology. This quickly gives me the number for the local branch where, you know, people answer. I find out what I want to do is possible and go back to the website. I get about halfway through filling out the application (and this is quite a detailed application) and realize I don't have my wife's driver's license number and expiration date memorized. So I cancel where I'm at and figure I'll take care of it at home that night.

Later on, at home, I begin the process of filling out (again) tons of information in the online application. With that out of the way, I can finally click "Continue" for the first time. It tells me I need a minimum of $100 to open a checking account and a minimum of $100 to open a savings account (otherwise there is a $3/mo fee). I don't want to open a savings account and I certainly don't want a $3/mo fee; why are you forcing me to open a savings account?

In another browser window I open up the advertisement page for the checking account details. "Oh I see... you have to open a combined checking and savings account to get this package." I don't want another savings account. ING already has us covered. How do I change this? "Oh awesome you can't change which account type you're opening after you've started the process so I need to completely trash this application and start all over for a different account type...."

So I began the process of filling out the application for the third time. This is starting to get dumb.

I actually make it all the way through the process. It asks me at the end how I want to fund the initial deposit to open the account. Now, mind you, anything less than a $1000 daily balance is subject to a $5 fee. I'm pleasantly surprised to see I can open a checking account by billing it to my credit card. Nice, how "easy" can it get? Wrong. There's a $500 max limit when using a CC for your initial deposit. Worthless. Ok so fine, I'll do this the old fashion way and mail you a check.

Next.... Next... OK Confirm... DONE!

I'm then greeted with a page letting me know I've been provisionally accepted and I see an email pops up with an exact copy of the page I'm looking at (gee ain't that helpful). And then I find this gem...

"Once your account is approved and we receive/process your opening deposit check, then"

And I think to myself, "you know, where exactly am I supposed to send that check which is my opening deposit?" Funny thing that, because it doesn't actually say anywhere on this page. So I check the email. Nope.

Dare I try that stupid phone menu again? Ok we'll give it a shot. So I fire up the 1-800 number. Same stupid menu. I try it again. Same thing, "enter you account number". About this time I'm starting to get kinda mad so I just start pushing buttons. Amazingly doing this I get in response "now transferring you to a customer service representative". Ah well had I just known that mashing buttons would let me speak to someone I would have done that from the get go.

Little music on hold and.... person! So I ask my question, "where do I send this?" She asks me a bunch of questions then concludes she can't help me. She says, "let me connect you to a product specialist." Ok, didn't think it would be that difficult but whatever. So the "product specialist" comes on and acts like she knows what's going on, starts trying to get me to open an account. No surprise I have to completely re-explain the whole thing all over again and ask my basic question: "I opened an account online, where do I mail the initial deposit check to?" Then she goes, "I'm going to need to get some more details, can I put you on hold?" Well of course you can, what else am I going to do?

I sit on hold for about 5 minutes listening to this dorky music when I hear it... or rather don't hear it. The line hangs up.

AWESOME

Now I'm mad. So I go back to the opening account email and I got and write a simple message, "Can I cancel this account? I no longer want it to be open." Hit send.

Seconds later I receive a reply...

The original message was received at Wed, 21 Apr 2010 00:17:27 -0700
from mail-qy0-f181.google.com [209.85.221.181]

----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----
<MyWellsfargo@wellsfargo.com>
(reason: 550 5.1.1 <MyWellsfargo@wellsfargo.com>... User unknown)

----- Transcript of session follows -----
... while talking to mxa10.wellsfargo.com.:
>>> DATA
<<< 550 5.1.1 <MyWellsfargo@wellsfargo.com>... User unknown
550 5.1.1 <MyWellsfargo@wellsfargo.com>... User unknown
<<< 503 5.0.0 Need RCPT (recipient)

Final-Recipient: RFC822; MyWellsfargo@wellsfargo.com
Action: failed
Status: 5.1.1
Remote-MTA: DNS; mxa10.wellsfargo.com
Diagnostic-Code: SMTP; 550 5.1.1 <MyWellsfargo@wellsfargo.com>... User unknown
Last-Attempt-Date: Wed, 21 Apr 2010 00:17:28 -0700


User Unknown!?!?! USER UNKNOWN!?!?!? ARE YOU THE WORST CUSTOMER SERVICE BANK EVER!?!?!? Your new account emails don't even come from a legit email address!?!?!


Needless to say, we won't be banking with Wells Fargo... EVER

Online Portfolio

Well, I've setup an online portfolio to try and get jobs while on the other side of the Pacific.  We'll see how this goes...

http://titusstone.carbonmade.com/

Successive Probability and Chance

Continuing with the "math and snowboarding" theme from yesterday, I found that sierrasnowboard.com has a daily snowboard giveaway. The way it works is that if you want to enter, you sign onto their giveaway chat room. They guarentee to give away at least 1 board, but for every 500 people that are in the chat room, they will give away another board. So say for example 687 people show up. They will give away 2 snowboards.

Looking through their "winners" history, it seems that they only give away 1 per day, with the occasional 2 given away. That means that the winners had at worst a 1 in 499 chance to win a snowboard. That seems very low, doesn't it?

This intrigued me a bit and so I wanted to develop out the successive probability of winning a snowboard through sequential entry attempts.

We all understand chance rather well. If there are 500 people in a room and 1 person can win something, then every individual has a 1-in-500 chance of winning. However, what most people assume is that if the event is repeated the number of times of the chance that it is guaranteed that that chance will occur. For our 1-in-500 chance, most people would assume that if the event was repeated 500 times that there is a 100% chance that everyone would win at least once. A small bit of thought reveals this isn't the case.

The reason why is that when people think that they are assuming the event chance is derived by simply adding up all the individual chances together:

(1/500) + (1/500) + (1/500) ...

In reality it's actually more complex than that. We can determine our successive probability by taking the chance that something will not happen and multiplying it against itself. This allows us to progressively determine a smaller and smaller chance that something is likely not to happen. We can then take that number and subtract it from 1 to give us the % that after x successive attempts it will happen:

1 - ( (499/500) * (499/500) * (499/500) )

Lots of math; I know. Anyways, with this formula we've determined that with a 1-in-500 chance, if we were to do something 3 times, we would have a 0.6% chance of it likely happening.

Now that we can calculate successive probability, let's see if we can put a realistic picture on the track record of the SierraSnowboard.com give away. Sierra keeps a tally of the last 2 months worth of wins on their site. Using these numbers, I averaged that approximately 2.12 boards are given away per day. Using this figure, we can infer that there are about 560 people present for each give away. This lends us a 2.12-in-560 chance of winning a snowboard per day. Using this we can determine our successive probability for winning...

1 - (557.88/560)^tries

Attempts	Likelihood of Winning
1 days	0.38%
5 days	1.88%
20 days	7.31%
50 days	17.27%
100 days	31.57%
150 days	43.39%
200 days	53.17%
260* days	62.70%
520 days	86.09%
2322 days	99.99%

So.... it would take about 9 years to "almost guarantee" that you would win one. As it turns out also, the increase in chance to win has a high amount of degradation as the chance itself gets higher. Here's a chart demonstrating this. You can see that as your chance increases, the successive step of increase really slopes off.



* -The event only runs on weekdays, so in a given year (52 weeks), there are a total of 260 weekdays. The event most likely is not conducted during holidays, so the true measure of a year would be lower.

The True Cost of Snowboarding (and how it compares to other activities)

Since we’ve announced our move to Colorado, it seems that invariably I almost immediately get one of two questions:

• Why Colorado? / Did you get a job in Colorado?
  -OR-
• Are you going to go snowboarding?

The second question is somewhat amusing and as you’d probably guess is usually asked almost entirely by males.

I was curious so I investigated.  A basic beginner’s startup package would cost about $400 for board, boots, and bindings.  Add another $250 of snow clothes that you got on sale at a winter store blow out and you’re good to go.  We’ll use $650 as an average “startup” cost for getting into the sport.

The real bucks start coming out when one talks about lift tickets.  The “at the window” price seems to be somewhere in the neighborhood of $60 for a single day.  An all season pass will start at around $500 for a single resort and go up from there for multi-resource passes.

This seemed really expensive to me so I wanted to break it down to understand it better.  Here’s a simple formula for that:

(ticket cost) / (hours x 60) = cost per minute

Assuming one has 12 hours of activity time on a given weekend, if you were to spend an hour or so driving to get there, an hour or so taking a break, and another hour taking a break for lunch, you’d end up with about 9 hours of actual activity time.  At 9 hours “on the slopes”, the cost per minute of a $60 lift ticket is 11.11 cents per minute.

But to get an idea of the true cost of snowboarding I needed to factor in the purchase of gear.  Assuming that gear purchased will last for 4 years, we arrive at a cost of $162.50/year for equipment.  Our imaginary season pass will cost us $500 a season and we’re estimating that we’ll go regularly at maybe 15 times per season.

($500 pass + $162.50 annual gear) / 15 visits = $44.17 per visit

($44.17 per visit) / (9 hours x 60) = $0.08 per minute for a season of snowboarding

So we can conclude that if one was to participate fairly frequently (but not every weekend) in snowboarding and purchase a beginner’s gear startup kit, they would spend approximately 8 cents per minute over a 5 year span on that activity.

Now, to put that into perspective, here are some other activities with their per-minute cost calculated for comparison:

Activity	Cost-Per-Minute
Costco shopping trip	$2.22 / min
Tandem Skydiving	$0.83 / min
Going to a fancy restaurant	$0.44 / min
Being a church member (avg. tithing, 4 hr/week attendance)	$0.43 / min
Going to McDonalds	$0.20 / min
Attending Hanalani	$0.15 / min
Visiting a museum	$0.14 / min
4-day Caribbean Cruise	$0.13 / min
Going to a movie theater	$0.12 / min
Talking on a cellphone (avg. monthly fee)	$0.12 / min
Watching basic cable TV (avg. monthly fee)	$0.08 / min
Playing billiards	$0.08 / min
Going bowling	$0.08 / min
Snowboarding	$0.08 / min
Six Flags for a day	$0.08 / min
Renting a movie	$0.04 / min
Buying/reading a novel	$0.03 / min
Having basic Netflix	$0.02 / min
Playing World of Warcraft	$0.01 / min

(activities that are not pay-per use were calculated assuming a average rate of consumption in minutes divided by the monthly cost)

Morning wake up

We woke up to a house demolishing in our backyard.