GIC Special Rates -Limited Time | Luminus Financial | Discussion forum

Kidd said
https://www.luminusfinancial.com/Personal/Rates/

Looks good.  

Read their Fees page before you sign up, if you're new to Luminus.
Best for local people in Toronto.
Read previous threads on Luminus first.

If you live locally, you can go in person and get a bank draft for a relatively small fee in order to remove your money. I think it was about $7. Then you can walk it over to another bank and deposit it there.
When we belonged to it at least, everything else was more expensive and they had no me-to-me provisions or linking to external accounts. I don't know if this has chanted since then as I don't follow them any more. We closed the account due to incompetence..

On withdrawals:
If you don't really have any use for a chequing account and don't want to pay for cheques, and only make occasional withdrawals (e.g when GICs mature), then the fee for the cheques is a fee you don't want to pay, nor should you have to, just to get at your own money, as there are many other FIs that make it free and easy to transfer.
If I am a new member and just bought one GIC, I may not want to pay for cheques until I see how I like this new FI. However, I see that you can buy four cheques for $8 at Luminus, so it could be worse. That plus he annual fee adds up to at least $18, but a five year GIC will cost you $58. Some may find that acceptable if the rate is good, but they will charge you that even if the rate is mediocre. For a one-off GIC, the draft is cheaper, and avoids the clutter of cheques and an account you don't want. My caution is simply that people need to be aware of the situation before they sign up.

On incompetence:
I quite agree that you can find instances of this in pretty well any FI, and you probably will sooner or later. However, some issues are more egregious than others and create greater risks, head scratching, and concern.
It's certainly true that you have to watch the paper work and so on carefully, but what do you do when they refuse to give you the paper work? - which was essentially spouse's experience at Luminus. They said that since it was the end of their business day by the time they had done all their paper work, and they wanted to go home, they would not provide the paper work that day and would send it instead by post. That mail never came. When spouse inquired about it, after various delays, bewilderment, and follow-up calls from our end, they concluded that the info had gone out for microfilming and nobody knew when it would be back and they had no access to it in the interim. It took many many months to get that info. By my standards, that was beyond the limits of acceptable error. It caused a lot of worry because we had no documentation of terms and they would not / could not provide them. Thus, we have severred that relationship because the incompetence was systemic and nobody there seemed to be concerned about it. To be honest, I've had better service at HSBC, where staff had a lot of trouble resolving a problem and would not go home until they'd fixed it even though the doors were locked.

Online-only FIs are potentially much worse because, by their studious use of the telephone, they control your ability to get through to anyone who might be able to solve a problem in a timely fashion.
I am currently experiencing this with motusbank (see motus thread). In this case the essential documents have been sent by them to an unknown person in another city and it is not known what has happened to them and nobody above a CSR will talk to me, no matter how insistent I may be.

Who among us has not been left hanging on hold for unacceptably long periods, not knowing if we are going to ever get to someone helpful or be summarily disconnected? I consider this "normal" incompetence.
The problem of lack of access to anyone with authority is being extended to bricks-and-mortar banks.
I note that when my TD branch amalgamated and was extensively renovated recently, my ability to wander past the branch manager's office was removed. He or she (who knows who it is?) is now hidden somewhere behind barriers. At one time, I used to always know the branch manager's name. It made me feel more confident to know I had his business card and could contact him, although I only had to do it once. Not now.
From what little I have read of management literature, the manager who has himself shut away is likely to be the least effective, but they have systematized that at TD (and perhaps others). Not so at my Meridian branch though. I know where the manager's office is at Meridian (close to the entrance and first-contact employees), she recognizes me even if she doesn't know my name, I have her telephone extension number, her door is usually open, and she answers her email and calls in a timely fashion. She can easily monitor branch traffic, and I can easily poke my nose in if necessary, although have not done so.

I agree, especially with your concluding statement of the issues facing some of us GIC investors..

I figure they all have some issues. I dump the ones that do something that scares me or that have recurring problems that really annoy or inconvenience me.