ING Posted First Ever Quarterly Loss

Dutch financial service giant ING, which operates ING Direct in the U.S., posted its first ever quarterly loss since the establishment of the company 17 years ago. In the third quarter, ING said it lost 478 million euros or $602 million, after the company took 1.5 billion euros in pretax write-downs on equities and debt securities (NYT). ING made a profit of 1.1 billion euros during the same period last year.

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In the above Bloomberg TV video, ING Financial Markets analyst says the bank needs to raise capital to go through the crisis in the financial market. Well, ING Direct’s latest rate cut certainly won’t help their effort to raise capital.

Speaking of ING Direct, here’s another piece of news (maybe old). I haven’t checked my ING Direct Orange Savings account for a while because their rate, currently at 2.75% APY, is much less attractive than other banks I am using. So I moved all my money to Capital One. When I did log in my account the other day, I saw that they are currently running a Magnify Your Savings Sweepstakes.

If you don’t want to use direct deposit, you can simply set up a plan to automatically transfer $100 every month from other banks to ING Direct to qualify for the sweepstakes (Don’t have an ING Direct account? Open one and get $25 bonus). Though I don’t use ING Direct any more, I do use a same method, I call it savings on autopilot, to move money from my checking account at Bank of America, to savings account at Capital One on every payday (every two weeks). It has been quite effective for us over the years to increase our savings.

Do you put your savings on autopilot?

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