TD Ameritrade & External Account Verification

The other day, I was thinking I needed to tap the cash in my TD Ameritrade brokerage account...but I couldn't find a current check book for the account. Turned out that I never ordered one for the account after I moved here to Manhattan. Guess I had figured I would save the expense for until I had the need to write a check. Which has been rare....

But, while looking at my cash management options, there seemed to be the indication that I could do electronic (ACH) transfers out of my TD Ameritrade account. In the past, I could only transfer in...and it was a hassle if I wanted to create a recurring one (though I don't have the excess of cash these days to do that, now that the IRA contribution limit is much higher, I'm making less and now that cost of living is higher and growing faster than my pay).

And, since moving to Manhattan, KS, I have gone from doing all my banking at one bank to 3 banks now. I still have my primary accounts at First Internet Bank of Indiana. But, I added a local bank....mainly so I now have somewhere to convert the piles of coins (though not so much now that it is so easy to pay with a credit card now)....into more usable forms of currency. And, the high interest savings account.... So, I went and linked these new accounts with my TD Ameritrade account.

Normally, this process works where they send two small deposits to the account to link with, and you verify that you got these deposits to complete the linking. And, that's it....

But, I got a surprise this morning when checking my accounts. After I verified the trial deposits, TD Ameritrade then withdrew the trial deposits.

Kind of surprised that they were that petty about the small amount of cash.... 0.97 cents between the two accounts I linked. And, the fact that I wasn't told that they were going to do this....especially since none of the other institutions that I done this with in the past have done anything like this (IE: Capital One, E*Trade, PayPal, TD Waterhouse)....

Perhaps, I should've added the TD Ameritrade account as an external account to my Capital One account. But, someday I plan to be in the position to put cash into the TD Ameritrade account for investing again...and it seemed to make sense that I should be able to easily pull money from my other accounts into it.