The same bank account for thirty years, VNB, Bank One, Chase


I've had the same bank account now for thirty years, beginning with Valley National Bank, where I started working in 1990. VNB was bought out by Bank One in 1992, but nothing much changed other than the name, and I spent most of my professional career with them, up until 1996. When I moved on to greener pastures that year, I kept the account, both because it just made sense, and also because I had, and still have, a genuine affection for that bank, which is now Chase. The names have changed, but the branches are all still in the same place, and I know where they are.

My mortgage on the house I'm in was also with Valley Bank, then moved to Bank One, then Chase. I signed up for automatic payment when I got the loan, and if I hadn't refinanced, the loan would be paid off by now. As it is, I guess I just gotta go on living, and Chase will automatically debit the amount at the first of every month. I will have spent thirty years here in 2023.

I know a lot of people who've moved their bank accounts around. Maybe they were interested in getting a free toaster, maybe they became disgruntled with a particular bank, I don't know. Apparently I'm gruntled.

It may just be a quirk of my personality, but although I knew that I had to move on from various companies, I look back on my time there with affection. Unlike my dad, who worked for the same company for thirty years, I would look up every once in a while and find that I had to go look for a new job. It was annoying at the time, but looking back, it kept things fresh for me.

I don't really know much about banking, I worked as a graphic designer in the Marketing Department, but a little bit of information rubbed off on me. I learned how much someone has to steal from a bank for it to be a Federal Offense (a penny!), and I also learned that banks can't discriminate against you on the basis of your age, so you can go ahead and sign for that thirty year mortgage no matter how old you are, and how ridiculous it might sound. I enjoyed working for VNB, and Bank One, and I'm happy with how Jamie Dimond is running Chase nowadays. He's two years older than me, but he seems to be doing fine, going strong. I'm glad that he's doing well.

Image at the top of this post: the Valley Bank branch at 44h Street and Camelback in the 1970s, now Chase, and for a long time, Bank One.Thank you for the encouragement! If you want to see daily pics of my adventures on my recumbent trike in suburban Phoenix (just for fun, of course!) you can follow me on Buy me a coffee, and you can buy me a coffee if you'd like to:

  Buy Me A Coffee

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me
Read more