WAMU checking accounts

I am sure that by now you have seen those commercials on television for WAMU, and you have probably, like me, kept promising yourself that you would look into it and see if it was a good alternative to your current bank. While I have no plans to leave my current bank, which I have been with for years, I would like to get a checking account that I can dedicate solely to business use. I have one now, but it is with the same bank I have my personal account with and all the time I was in Las Vegas I was continually flipping two cards around to see which was for personal use and which was the business use card.

The checking accounts at WAMU are separated into two different types of account - The WAMU free checking, and the WAMU platinum checking.

The free checking account requires only $1 to open, so it is the one that most people would be looking at for a primary or secondary account. There is also no monthly fee associated with the account regardless of the balance in the account. The two points where WAMU does not compare to my current bank account is that my current bank pays interest on the money that I have in the account, where the WAMU free checking account does not pay any interest, and my current bank has no ATM fees and refunds up to three ATM fee charges per month charged by other banks and ATM use fees. WAMU has no ATM fees, but they do not refund any fees charged by other banks or ATM machines.

Still, WAMU has a lot of good features that makes it a bank worth looking into by anyone looking to change banks or get a second account. My main attraction at this point is their free checking account comes with a gold MasterCard, where my bank runs VISA. By having an account with WAMU I would be able to have both the VISA (with my current bank) and a MasterCard (through WAMU).