Helpful advice regarding bank mergers

[teardropdragon]

I just want to take a moment to share my Mint experience as it applies to the Chase/Wamu merger.

This past weekend, Chase completed the conversion of Wamu online banking to Chase online banking, and as a result I found it necessary to update my Wamu account access to chase.com. I highly recommend anyone facing a similar situation simply "add an account" rather than update the existing one. Do NOT delete your old account, even though it will no longer update.

As a result of my actions, I lost transaction history dating back to August 2008, because Chase was only able to retain the current month's transactions. This affected all of my trends as well as cash flow calculations.

Please be more careful than I was!!

[ericvlach]

I experienced the same problem. I went ahead and 'deleted' my wamu account, since it had a balance on it and was doubling my total cash that i had. However, deleting it also removes all transactions.

I don't have a good solution. Since all my wamu transactions were deleted, it messed up my cashflows, budgets, trends... I went ahead and deleted and re-added all my accounts to i can start from zero.

Hoping someone finds a better solution.

[sebcruz]

I added a new Chase Savings/Checking account first. It downloaded the most recent 91 transactions that, of course, were duplicates of my Wamu Checking/Savings accounts. After Mint finished downloading the transactions I went to the "Transactions" tab in Mint and filtered on the new Chase accounts by clicking on their name. I then marked each of the 91 transactions as a Duplicate. Finally, I edited the "Status" of the WaMu Savings account and the WaMu Checking account as "Closed" individually. That last action removed WaMu from the Overview and the "Total Cash" calculations without getting rid of the year and a half of history I had in Mint.

[CoryKlatt]

sebcruz, nice job. I only wish I'd read your post prior to deleting my WAMU account. I mis-read another post leading me to believe that my transaction history would remain after deleting the accounts. I poked around looking for a way to change the status of my account and didn't find an easy intuitive way to change the status. This re-inforced my poor judgement causing me to loose my history. The only good news for me is that I exported all of my transactions to excel so at least I have some history.

Follow sebcruz advice! He nailed it.

Mint - please add a feature to allow us to import transactions.

[ben_b]

mint please just convert our wamu accounts to login to chase now.

[heyotwell]

See, I did exactly this, and my WaMu history is gone. It seems to me that it was there when I followed these steps at the time of the merger, but that in the last week or so (mid-October 2009) the transactions have suddenly vanished. Has anyone else noticed this?