Online banking... security versus liquidity while traveling

[SomethingClever]

I'm trying to figure out where to keep my $$$ while my wife and I travel for a year. Index funds and other investments are out, because I will need to reinvest most of the money in just one year and I don't have time to deal with any variance.

Right now I'm looking at either an online savings account with wamu (5% apy) or a CD with ING (5.15%).

The nice thing about ING is that I feel like it will be more secure to have a segregated account that I won't be accessing for any reason while we're traveling. HOWEVER, the downside to ING is that I don't want to put more than 100k in there without adding my wife to the account for FDIC purposes (to get insured up to 200k). I'm not sure how difficult the process of adding a spouse is... maybe this is a non-issue. But the other thing is that the money will be locked away for either 6 or 12 months. I don't plan on using any of it during the trip, but you never know.

The nice thing about wamu is that the money would be liquid, and already insured up to 200k because my wife is already on that account. HOWEVER, having the money right there in an account linked to my online banking makes me nervous. Should I worry about checking balances and transfering funds over wireless connections (on my own laptop) in foreign countries?

What should I do?

[Newt_Buggs]

There are others on this board that know more about this than me, but I'm pretty sure that worrying about the FDIC insurance is mostly a waste of time. The chance that WAMU goes bankrupt, takes all of your money, and the government refuses to reimburse more than your 100k is pretty much zero.

[soko]

[ QUOTE ]
There are others on this board that know more about this than me, but I'm pretty sure that worrying about the FDIC insurance is mostly a waste of time. The chance that WAMU goes bankrupt, takes all of your money, and the government refuses to reimburse more than your 100k is pretty much zero.

[/ QUOTE ]

"NEW YORK, Sept 10 (Reuters) - Washington Mutual Inc (WM.N: Quote, Profile , Research) said on Monday that most U.S. housing markets are weakening, creating a "near perfect storm" that may force the largest U.S. savings and loan to set aside more money for bad loans."

http://today.reuters.com/news/articleinv...NG-UPDATE-3.XML

Who knows how bad things could possibly get in the year OP is gone. I don't think there is any reason to not make sure you are insured for all your money.

[SomethingClever]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
There are others on this board that know more about this than me, but I'm pretty sure that worrying about the FDIC insurance is mostly a waste of time. The chance that WAMU goes bankrupt, takes all of your money, and the government refuses to reimburse more than your 100k is pretty much zero.

[/ QUOTE ]

"NEW YORK, Sept 10 (Reuters) - Washington Mutual Inc (WM.N: Quote, Profile , Research) said on Monday that most U.S. housing markets are weakening, creating a "near perfect storm" that may force the largest U.S. savings and loan to set aside more money for bad loans."

http://today.reuters.com/news/articleinv...NG-UPDATE-3.XML

Who knows how bad things could possibly get in the year OP is gone. I don't think there is any reason to not make sure you are insured for all your money.

[/ QUOTE ]

Also, to clarify, at Wamu, we would be covered up to 200k. It's the ING account that is only covered for 100k at the moment.

If I add my wife I assume it will go to 200k automatically. But I'm not sure how difficult it is to go through that process. At Wamu it's easy, you just walk into the bank together. Not possible at ING.

[SomethingClever]

Further, I'm less worried about the FDIC situation than I am about my account getting hacked somehow.

What's the worst thing that could happen if someone hacked my Wamu bank account with all my money in it? How easy/difficult would it be for them to get the money out?

I know it's not like poker where they can chip dump all my money in a matter of minutes. But could they somehow wire all my funds to a different account?

[captZEEbo]

[ QUOTE ]
Further, I'm less worried about the FDIC situation than I am about my account getting hacked somehow.

What's the worst thing that could happen if someone hacked my Wamu bank account with all my money in it? How easy/difficult would it be for them to get the money out?

I know it's not like poker where they can chip dump all my money in a matter of minutes. But could they somehow wire all my funds to a different account?

[/ QUOTE ]I might consider getting a high yield checking account with a debit and never logging into the acct.

[gusmahler]

If you're that worried about FDIC insurance (I wouldn't be), just use two different on-line banks. You can find plenty of them at www.bankrate.com

[defixated]

When I was in Thailand last year I took a bootable USB stick with Damn Small Linux and Firefox to log onto financial accounts. This obviously doesn't protect from hardware keyloggers or physical observation hacks but did make me feel more secure than using a random Windows box. Smoking fast, too.

I would show the USB stick when I walked in as a way of asking permission. Most places don't lock down USB (this in itself is a pretty big security hole), but on the rare occasions that the entire internet cafe consisted of special-purpose web-browser-only kiosk machines I'd just go down the block since public internet access is so widely available outside the US.

You can buy a preloaded stick for about $70 shipped or set it up yourself in about 20 min. I think you can actually squeeze the install onto a drive as small as 64MB if you have one lying around. 1GB drives are about $10 these days.

P.S.: don't forget the stick! Put the cap between your teeth or something. Given my security concerns I couldn't believe that I once left it plugged into a hotel's public terminal the morning I checked out. 30 min rt taxi ride that evening to find it still glowing green at the back of the PC.

Edited: missed the part about using your own laptop. Just be careful with it; you're much more at risk for laptop theft than someone decrypting your https connection. Also a good idea to make sure your email is secure, as the default is to send email as plain text, and that is easily snooped by anyone on the same network.