In January of 1913, a man in Ohio opened up a passbook savings account for his baby daughter with $6.11. And in probably the lengthiest example of customer loyalty, that girl — now a 100-year-old woman — has continued to use that same account ever since.
According to the AP, the branch manager of the Huntington National Bank where that ancient account is held learned about its history when one of the customer's friends mentioned to him that the woman had been using the account for 98 years.
He looked into it and found that the account number had only been changed once in all those years, and that was only after the original institution (with the so-generic-it's-awesome name of Savings Bank) had been acquired by Huntington in the early '80s.
The woman says she still has the passbook from when her pop, a farmer, made the initial deposit in the hopes that she would eventually learn how to save responsibly.
"That's what he always taught us: to stay out of debt and save our money and not buy anything until we had the money to pay for it," the woman, who has been retired since 1976, said.
Luckily, her dad didn't open the passbook account at Bank of America.
She has a separate checking account to pay her bills, but uses the savings account for "personal dealings."
When it came time for the loyal customer to celebrate her big 1-0-0 yesterday, the bank threw her a party and — more importantly — raised the interest rate on that prehistoric savings account to 5% for the next 100 days.
Woman has bank account dating to 1913 [WIVB.com]
Nice story. I still have my grandparents mortgage book from the 1940's and you can see where my granfather religiously made payments each Friday. As a russian immigrant he built his own house and had it paid off in ten years. They lived well with in their means.
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