• I keep hoping for a mobile app from Ally, the best online bank currently in my opinion, as well as business accounts. But so far nothing.
• I also keep hoping for a Simple invite, but still nothing there.
• Finally, I hope for America First Credit Union to upgrade their online banking so I can see both my business accounts and personal with one login, in one place… no such luck. So now you can see why I’m still with Wells.

However, with this change is just too much. Because I’m self-employed, I can’t do direct deposit. A $1500 balance?!?!?! Are you kidding? I have a family. Oh, OR I can setup autopay on a WF loan or mortgage. Well I don’t have one of those, and I’ll never get one. Not for WF at least. That means I can pay $80/yr for my account (I do use electronic statements), or I can leave WF permanently.

When I used to work for WF, they would talk about “sticky products.” Those were various services or accounts the bank provided, that made it hard for a customer to leave. Well, Wells, after 13 years of banking with you, you’ve finally made it more painful for me to stay, than to go. Well done. Maybe we need to start abbreviating WF as WtF instead?

Upcoming changes to your Custom Management® Checking account
The March statement for your Custom Management Checking account included a message about changes to your account. For your convenience, we’ve summarized the changes below.
What’s changing
Effective May 4, 2012, the $25 monthly automatic transfer, Save As You Go® transfer and daily automatic transfer of $1 or more are no longer available options to waive the monthly service fee.

The current $10 monthly service fee is not changing. You can waive the current $10 monthly service fee when you have three additional linked accounts or services (such as a Wells Fargo debit card, savings account, online banking or direct deposit) and one of the following:

• Maintain a $1,500 minimum daily balance, OR
• Maintain a qualifying monthly direct deposit of $500 or more1, OR
• Maintain a monthly automatic loan payment from this Package checking account to a Wells Fargo home equity/personal loan or line of credit, or Wells Fargo Home Mortgage® loan

If you do not meet the new criteria for the monthly service fee waiver, the monthly service fee will appear on your account statement on or after June 4, 2012.

Effective June 4, 2012, if you are assessed the monthly service fee, you can receive a discount of $2 per month when you set up and receive online only statements for this account.
What you may need to do

Automatic transfers are no longer available to waive the monthly service fee. Please review the new monthly service fee waivers carefully as it may be necessary for you to take action to ensure your account is not assessed a monthly service fee.

What isn’t changing:

• The monthly service fee on your checking account will remain the same and there will continue to be options to waive this fee.
• Your qualifying automatic transfer will continue to waive the monthly service fee on select savings accounts.
• Your account number will remain the same.
• You can continue to use your existing debit card and checks.
• Your automatic payments, transfers, scheduled online bill payments and direct deposits will continue uninterrupted.
• Your account will continue to be FDIC-insured up to the applicable limits.
• You will continue receiving the same benefits and services including:

More than 6,300 Wells Fargo locations and 12,000 ATMs
Free access to Wells Fargo Online® Banking with Bill Pay
Telephone customer service available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week
If you have questions, or would like to receive a free financial review to see if you have the right accounts and services to meet your financial goals, please contact your local banker or call us at 1-800-TO-WELLS (1-800-869-3557), 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Thank you. We appreciate your business.
Sincerely,
Wells Fargo Consumer Deposits Group

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I found 2 recent posts extremely insightful and interesting. The first came from Good Design, and explores the idea that creative types need different outlets for their creativity.

I don’t know that it’s exclusive to those who are creative, but regardless the major point is very true: I need different ways to express my creativity. Sometimes I’ll just create a logo for somebody for free, because I need to get away from building websites or even designing them. Sometimes I just have an itch to write, because I’ve been doing too much design. Sometimes I need to run, hike, or go shooting, because there’s creativity involved in all, and it gets me away from the norm of my days. My latest favorite creative outlet is telling stories. Like my Dad did for me when I was young, I tell Colter stories before naps and/or bedtime. He loves them. He’s always asking for a “cowboy Bill story” or a “bear story.” I enjoy it too, it’s a great creative outlet for me, even-though the stories are often very simple.

The other post was sorta re-posted on Lifehacker, and reminded me of a quote by Og Mandino:

Welcome every morning with a smile. Look on the new day as another special gift from your Creator, another golden opportunity to complete what you were unable to finish yesterday. Be a self-starter. Let your first hour set the theme of success and positive action that is certain to echo through your entire day. Today will never happen again. Don’t waste it with a false start or no start at all. You were not born to fail.

The article talked about how much more effective the author was when he started the day by writing some or creating something. On days where he started that way, rather than perusing his inbox, or checking up on friend’s status updates on The Facebook, he found he was many times more effective throughout the day. Even if the day included some of those kinds of distractions and breaks.

The first article is something I want to try and recognize better and make sure that I “shift gears” creatively so that I’m better at my creativity. The 2nd article reminded me of something I already knew, but need to focus on more: starting the day off by producing something. That’ll make me more focused and all around better at what I do.

I just tried to change my plan back from 500 txt messages/month to 250, like I had before. When I upgraded, because I was going over, I was specifically told I could go back to the 250/month (and this wasn’t very long ago). Now I’m told I can’t.

I’m extremely frustrated with Verizon’s policy of raising prices and giving new customers better deals and incentives than us long-time loyal customers. Everyone knows that technology only gets cheaper, yet Verizon insists on raising its prices, rather than follow that trend. More and more I feel that Verizon’s business model encourages us long time customers (I was with Verizon on my parents plan for years before getting the one I have now) to pack up and go to Sprint or an innovative new option like Republic Wireless, for truly unlimited everything, and prices that don’t keep increasing.

If it were just me who felt this way, or even a handful of customers, it wouldn’t be a big deal to Verizon, but as was recently shown when you tried to start charging us for paying our bill online, there’s a huge portion of your customer base that cares. On top of it Seth Godin, recognized as perhaps the world’s foremost expert in marketing has specifically used Verizon as a bad example the very issues I’m talking about. You can see his articles here: How You Should Treat Your Best Customers and here: Learning From Frustration

Unhappy customers does not lead to increased profits. Please reconsider and start taking care of us long-time customers. Oh, and please top putting garbage apps on all your Android phones!

Then I sent this message to Republic Wireless, who’s innovative approach is finally encouraging the well-known technology trend of “always smaller and cheaper” that somehow doesn’t seem to apply to Verizon and AT&T:

I assume you’ve already thought of this, but just wanted to send a message, in case you hadn’t, or wondered if there were people out there who would love this option:

If you could create a Republic Wireless app that could be installed on any rooted Android device to provide the hybrid calling, then we could bring any Sprint-compatible device to Republic. I don’t know if this is possible from a technical standpoint. But I would assume that with root access, it should be possible. If I could buy a Galaxy Nexus (even for $600 or whatever they cost) and switch to Republic, then only need to root the phone (very easy with that particular one) and install your app, but still be able to get updates directly from Google, etc, I’d do it in a heartbeat. In fact, I’d start saving money right now to come up with $1200 to get one for my wife and one for myself and we’d switch immediately. Now maybe 4G throws a wrench in things, or maybe what I suggest isn’t that easy, but if you can do it, I’d highly recommend it. There’s a lot of people like myself who have WiFi access most of the time, and HATE the ever increasing costs (what ever happened to technology always getting smaller and cheaper?) of regular mobile service. We appreciate what you’re doing, but aren’t quite ready to flock to you because of the limited phone offerings. But open that up, and flock we will!

Sometimes you just have to voice your opinion to make your self feel better. But if lots of others do the same, Verizon will start listening, in the same way the US Congress listened regarding SOPA & PIPA, BofA & Wells Fargo heard us regarding debit card fees, Netflix didn’t split their DVD & streaming options into separate services because the cries were so loud, and even Verizon dug the wax out of their ears for a moment when we told them how upset we were about their new fees to pay online. If that happens, then it won’t be just to make yourself feel better.

UPDATE: a few days later a Verizon guy called and basically just went through the list of issues I mentioned in my message above. But instead of trying to really understand my concerns, he just spouted out “the company line” and then moved to the next item. I didn’t want to waste time with somebody who obviously didn’t want to really understand to pass on my concerns, so I didn’t push back or argue, I just let it go to get the call over with, politely.

He made several completely false statements such as “we have not increased our prices on anything.” Perhaps the per-text price hasn’t changed. But If I used to pay $5 for the less-than 250 texts that I use, and I now pay $10 for those same texts, that’s an increase! Also, data plans: for any customers who are grandfathered, they get “UNLIMITED” data for $30/month. Any new customers only get 2GB of data for the same $30/month. That’s a price increase no matter how you look at it. Here’s hoping Republic Wireless or somebody comes out with a real game-changer that starts up some real competition and humbles the big carriers and forces them to start truly competing (same with handset manufacturers).

All you do is put in the email address and click the “Verify” button. If the email address exists, you’ll get “Result: OK.” If it doesn’t, you’ll get “Result: Bad.”

Another Method

If you think you know the email address, try Googling it. I found the address I was looking for, right next to the person’s name, in a PDF that was the top result on Google for that email address. That makes things much easier and more sure that its going to the correct person.

Thankfully, 2 of my proposals were accepted and I’ll be presenting. I don’t have all the details as far as scheduling, etc. yet, but you can find me on the “Schedule” of the official RootsTech website. Here’s the info on my presentations as it appears there:

Awesome Family Websites: Record Your Living Family History
Connect with living family while sharing memories of those who have passed on. This presentation will briefly cover how to build or buy your own, easy-to-use, private family website. Then it will explore the experiences of several extended families to show just how effective these websites can be in connecting your family. Throughout, you’ll be shown how to effectively use and manage a powerful family website, as well as how to use it to privately share family history stories, data, and more.

The Powers of Evernote: photos, URL’s, censuses, geo-location, and stories
Evernote is an excellent central location for all genealogy research. Store photos of gravestones, record a page with a picture, save web content with a click, record audio, outline blog posts, and geo-tag locations. We’ll cover the basics of using Evernote Desktop, Android/iOS mobile apps, Web, and Web Clipper.

If you register through the end of Nov. you get discounted pricing. So head over to RootsTech.org and sign up now!

Also you can check out more info on the family websites I provide to people on my company’s website. Or by watching this video:

I also wanted one other thing that made the final difference: separation between personal and business. Email takes up way to much of my day and is often a distraction. But unfortunately, I can’t just close my email for most of the day like many experts such as Tim Ferriss recommend, because too much of my work is done inside my inbox or pulling information from client emails to put on their website, into designs, etc. So what I needed was a separate Gmail account for business. Getting personal and business email in the same inbox was very ineffective and distracting.

So here’s how to do it:

The trick is a little program called Gmail Backup. It’s fairly easy to use: you just go to your Gmail settings and turn on IMAP under “Forwarding and POP/IMAP.” Then install this little program and run it. Input your Gmail login info, followed by selecting the folder where you’d like all your email saved. Then select dates (I looked up the oldest email in my account and put that as the “Since date”). Finally, click “Backup.” It may take several hours (mine did) to download all the emails, attachments, etc. from your account, but once it does, you just repeat the process: enable IMAP, input login credentials, etc, but this time for your new Google Apps account. And click the “Restore” button at the end instead. Now all that data you downloaded, will be backed-up to your new Google Apps account.

On the Gmail Backup site, it says that there is an issue and that it will not retrieve nested or sub-labels from Gmail properly. I didn’t find this to be an issue. I think that upgrades to Gmail on Google’s end have eliminated this issue because sub labels are treated with a “-” instead of a “/” nowadays. So the label “business” with a sub-label (or nested label) of “invoices” used to look like “business/invoices”, but now is “business-invoices.” Thus eliminating Gmail Backup’s issue.

Here’s the tricky part: eliminating biz email from your personal Gmail, and personal email from your business Google Apps email. I had been having all email that came to my business email, labeled under a “business” label using a filter in Gmail. So in my personal, it was fairly easy: just select the label, and click “Delete.” Another route is to run a filter based on the business email. I used that tactic in the biz account: filtering all email sent or received by my personal email address(es). I quickly ran though some of that to ensure nothing I wanted in my biz account would be deleted, then gave it all a label like “delete.” Then I simply checked the checkbox button to select everything in that label, followed by clicking the link that said something like “Select all 3,356 conversations in ‘Delete’” and clicked the Delete button.

That was it: no business in my personal, and no personal in my business. In the intervening weeks I can say it’s been far more effective and many times less distracting. Plus with Google’s easy “account switching” feature I can still switch easily enough if needed, I’m just not distracted by personal emails all day when I’m trying to work.