Online services don’t provide reliable records
It’s tax time, and you will probably need numbers from your financial institution to complete your tax return. If you have gone paperless you may be chagrinned to learn that you can’t always get needed information from your bank’s or broker’s website because the cloud forgets stuff. Peter has chosen to forego paper statements, and like Kermit the frog he has found “it’s not easy being green.” Here is his saga and advice to those who trust in the cloud.
My credit card company called asking me to verify a suspicious charge. Because the charge was under an agent’s, not the selling merchant’s name, I didn’t recognize it so the caller told me she would pass the incident to the fraud investigation department. After hanging up, I logged into my account to check on the mysterious charge, only to find I was locked out.
After two days of calling I learned my account had accidentally been terminated, and the only remedy was to apply for a new credit card, which meant a new credit card number and new online profile–all the old online information was unavailable. A month later my old account was reinstated, including online access to it–but had my account been truly compromised, access to all online information would have permanently been blocked.
In another situation, after moving to Virginia, I opened a new local brokerage account but kept my old account to retain online access to information. For tax purposes I had to determine a stock purchase price and tried to look it up on the old account only to find my access denied. It turned out that online access is granted at the account manager’s discretion, and I had a new account manager who unilaterally terminated my online access. Many phone calls and days later I reestablished online access, only to be informed that 30 days after that access would again be denied.
In another episode, I needed a receipt for a transaction from more than six months earlier. I learned that the firm in question only makes information available online for six months. After that you must pay to receive a paper statement, which arrives by snail mail within 10 business days. So it costs time and money, and is definitely not green.
Perhaps most frustrating is my bank’s electronic bill payment service. The bank only displays the amount due and the amount paid. Six mouse clicks into the quest for an old transaction is a small link called “view bill.” Clicking on the link usually redirects to the vendor’s home page. If you’re lucky you land on a pre-authenticated web page with links to PDFs of old bills. But in many cases–like that of my phone company–you are dumped onto the payor’s home page, where you must establish yet another online account. And half clicks on “view bill” result in an error message because the bank “forgot” to include the payor link.
The takeaway is, you can’t count on the cloud to cough up the information you need when you need it. To play it safe, download the PDF of each statement and save it to your hard drive every month–and of course back up the files. Reliably archiving data for future use is more trouble than simply receiving paper statements and stashing them in a shoebox.
Yes, there are online services or financial management software packages that can streamline the process. Quicken can grab information about the cost of an item for example. But which will an IRS auditor believe–a report generated on my laptop, or a picture of the real original statement?
It is foolhardy to rely on important information stored on the cloud–and in all these scenarios I have a financial relationship with the financial institution. I actually pay for this “service”! Imagine the dependability of records stored in the cloud for free.
Although you may nonchalantly trust you will have instant access to your information when you need it, you won’t know until you try–and you may find out too late that your trust has been misplaced. Don’t be complacent about the cloud.
