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Asian Chamber of Commerce President Rogene Calvert (left) looks to FDIC officials Lisa N. Kanemoto and Martin Becker.
HOUSTON: In times of recessoin, it is common to worry about your savings. Some immigrants tend to stuff their savings under the mattress or horde gold.
A safer approach is to leave your money in the bank, according to officials from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) at a media briefing held Tuesday, Jan. 26 at the Hilton Garden Inn in Houston’s Chinatown district. In the event of a bank failure, the FDIC in onsite the very next day to refund deposits up to $250,000 to bank customers.
The media briefing was prompted by a rash of failures of small banks throughout the United States in face of growing loan defaults.
Presenters at the media briefing included Martin Becker, associated director of the FDIC consumer protection bank and Lisa N. Kanemoto, FDIC Community Affairs Specialist. Rogene Calvert, President, Asian Chamber of Commerce, served as the moderator for the discussion panel that included representatives of the Chinese and Vietnamese community.
Kanemoto gave the example of an Asian woman in Los Angeles who withdrew her savings from a bank that was about to fail, but lost the money she had placed in her home due to a fire.
If you (or your family) have deposits at one FDIC-insured bank with a combined total balance less than the basic maximum insurance amount under federal law – currently $250,000 through year-end 2013 – all of that money is fully protected.
You may qualify for much more than the standard maximum insurance amount at the same bank – perhaps millions of dollars of coverage – if you have funds in different “ownership” categories. That’s because the FDIC’s rules allow for separate $250,000 coverage for deposits held in your name alone (single accounts), accounts with one or more other people (joint accounts), accounts that name beneficiaries when you die (testamentary or revocable trust accounts), and certain retirement accounts, such as Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs)
The U.S. Congress has extended the standard maximum deposit insurance amount from $100,000 to $250,000 through December 31, 2013. As bank failures are in the news, the FDIC is reminding consumers that our financial resources run deep and that their insured deposits are fully protected.
FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair, has said the number of bank failures this year should exceed the 140 failures that occurred in 2009. The FDIC has projected that bank failures would cost its insurance fund about $100 billion from 2009 through 2013. |
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