Penfed ACH Policy

RJM | Jul 23, 2018 | 430 posts since 2011

Thank you for contacting PenFed.

The $5,000 transfer limit for new members is only for incoming transfers. You

may transfer the entirety of your certificate funds out.

Brad Bradford

PenFed Credit Union

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They had previously said there was a $5000 per day ach limit.

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emdtech | Oct 23, 2018 | 6 posts since 2010

PenFed - ACH limits on transfer out. Per operations manager, ACH outbound transfers are limited to $5k. Inbound was not limited when I opened the my CD's in Dec 2013. Not sure if that changed today. You can wire out the money, but charges may occur on both sides.

I did discover about mid-October 2018 that you may link a non-PenFed account and specify the entire proceeds VIA ACH transfer out with the stipulation that both maturity and dividends are the SAME account. I changed both to my non-PenFed account and the system faulted out. They have issues right now and need more time to vet the system. When it happened to me, they defaulted to sending a check in the mail and not the previous selection I specified as going to the share account. PenFed IT needs to fix the bug and I spent many hours on this task.

PenFed's CDs are competitive but not the highest. PenFed has too many hurdles to overcome with internal communications. They make it difficult to do business with long term. Be sure you understand your options before investing or your money may not be as available as you think it should be.

Sylvia | Oct 24, 2018 | 162 posts since 2012

ACH limits are covered in their membership disclosures, https://www.penfed.org/content/dam/penfed/general/pdf/Forms/general/Form-794-6-2018. See pages 12-13.

The answer seems not to be straightforward as PenFed takes into consideration a number of factors: credit history, membership tenure, time since last ACH transfer, type of savings account. For the premium online savings account, “the maximum you are allowed to transfer to your account at another financial institution is $5,000 per business day and $50,000 per 30 calendar day period.”

RJM | Oct 24, 2018 | 430 posts since 2011

Their reps gave me the wrong answer once and it cost me a wire fee. The next time, I was able to ACH out all I wanted...from an external source.

When my future CDs mature, I will ACH them out via my broker or ally probably.

emdtech | Nov 3, 2018 | 6 posts since 2010

What is stated& what many CSR's understand are 2 different things. I'm still working to resolve this matter of linking external accounts to maturing CD's to get around the $5k limitation per day. They mentioned in writing to me that this option is available to ACH out the entire CD at amounts far greater than $5k but it still is not working as of today.

alan1 | Nov 3, 2018 | 321 posts since 2015

emdtech -- you may wish to consider the following:

1. Go the website of your external (non-PenFed) account. Link your external account to your PenFed savings account.
2. Once you've established the link, and are confident it's functioning, go to the PenFed website (or call PenFed) and arrange for the proceeds of your PenFed CD to go into your PenFed savings account when the CD matures.
3. When the proceeds are in your PenFed savings account, go to the website of your external account and have your external institution pull the funds out of your PenFed savings account.

niniss | Jan 5, 2019 | 69 posts since 2010

Whoever told u that was either lying or just being incompetent. It's still $5k and worse, $5k in a rolling 3 days. I literally had my funds earning nothing for 8 days because i forgot about this limitation.

emdtech | Jan 6, 2019 | 6 posts since 2010

Yes.. perhaps but I don't believe they intentionally try to deceive customers.

After many phone calls & non responses from an operations manager, I was able to get help with both maturing CDs. They wired both CDs out to an external account at no charge after i received conflicting information from various PenFed staff.

HighYield | Jan 5, 2019 | 62 posts since 2018

I selected "ACH transfer" in the maturing certificate options. Will the entire balance go back to my linked bank?

emdtech | Jan 6, 2019 | 6 posts since 2010

Just to be safe, I would speak with an operations manager. Floor supervisor cannot make this happen easily. Also, that's what I tried to do initially and tested it by placing the prior month's dividend to an external account. It froze my account & they cut checks for the dividends instead. I'm not sure if the fix is in place to correct this matter so that's why I suggested you contact management.

gssharp777 | Jan 9, 2019 | 5 posts since 2013

Credit unions often operate under peculiar rules. Some here have mentioned that you can establish a link to the Penfed account and pull the money. I tried that with Navy Fed, and I can't pull a dime from Penfed. However, Ally seems to be able to easily pull and push money to any location. I know that BANKS often operate with different rules than credit unions, and this may be one of those situations. Anyway, I linked Ally with Penfed, and initiated an online transfer of $100K. The money disappears into the ether for a couple of days, but it looks like it's working. I've used Ally as a money moving hub before, and their excellent user-friendly website makes it very easy.

Kirkland | Jan 9, 2019 | 30 posts since 2014

Appears that my 3 CD's maturing near the end of January at PenFed will have to be mailed to me via check.... would not want to go through this 10 day snail mail wait annually and mostly the reason not to do business with these credit unions and online savings accounts that limit transfers out to ridiculously low amounts

gssharp777 | Jan 10, 2019 | 5 posts since 2013

Some are easier to deal with than others. As I mentioned, Ally seems to work very well as a hub for these CU accounts.

Sylvia | Jan 9, 2019 | 162 posts since 2012

"Some here have mentioned that you can establish a link to the Penfed account and pull the money. I tried that with Navy Fed, and I can't pull a dime from Penfed.” gssharp777, Navy imposes alot of restrictions when using their ACH services. I believe, when attempting to pull funds, the external account must be a checking one. You can read more here, https://www.navyfederal.org/pdf/applications-forms/NFCU_652A_NFO.pdf. Alternatively, if you meant to say you were unsuccessful in pulling from Navy Fed (not PenFed), to my knowledge, Navy is the only CU that prohibits ACH withdrawals from your savings account there, even those initiated from outside. I’ve always done what alan1 described above in his 3-step process, and that routine has yet to fail me. In the case of Navy, I opened a checking account for that purpose. Navy does allow ACH withdrawals from checking.

gssharp777 | Jan 10, 2019 | 5 posts since 2013

Sylvia...that's probably it. I was talking about pulling from a Penfed savings. As I have a NFCU checking and MM account, it isn't usually isn't hard to move money in and out of NFCU. For getting the money out of Penfed, linking the Ally savings account worked.

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