My Terrible Experience with CIT Bank 11 Month No Penalty CD

Over the past few months the interest rates for CDs have been going up so I started looking into some options for opening up a new account. I wanted a “No Penalty CD” which allows you to withdraw the money whenever you want as opposed to traditional CDs where you are expected to keep the money in the account for a certain period of time.

After researching the rates, one of the best I found was from CIT Bank so I decided to give them a try and open up a new account. Setting up and funding the account was ok. It wasn't until a few weeks later that there started to become some issues.

A few weeks after funding the account I began to look for the withdraw option just so I would know what to do if I wanted to take the money out. On the website, it has a “Transfer Money” section where supposedly you are able to transfer money. The problem is, it doesn't actually let you transfer money. Every time I clicked on it, it would just say I had to call them at their customer service number.

They have an option to send them a secure message on the website so I tried that first. I emailed them asking how to withdraw the money. Many days went by and I did not receive a reply so I decided to call them.

The first time I called, it said there was a 56 minute wait time. It had the option to call me back instead of waiting on hold, so I did that. When it finally called me back and said I was next in line, it disconnected the call before I even got to talk to someone.

I tried calling back the next day and waited about 25 minutes before I was connected to a representative. I told them I wanted to withdraw the money back to my account, but they said they could not do that by phone. They said I had to send a message to request it. I told them I did already and never got a reply. The representative said they would check on it. A few minutes later the call was disconnected.

I sent a 2nd email directly requesting the transfer. After 2 days I still did not receive a reply. At this point I was starting to get worried. I had money in this account and so far 3 different attempts to get it back had failed.

I looked into what other options I had at this point and one was to file a complaint with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau which is a government company that keeps an eye on financial institutions and helps with issues like this. So I filed a complaint with them and waited for a response.

2 weeks after sending my first message asking how to withdraw funds, they finally replied back and said I had to provide the routing numbers for the bank in order to do the transfer. I found this odd considering my account was already connected and on file, but I provided the information again anyway.

Another 2 weeks went by before I finally got a response saying that they would transfer the money back to my account.

In the end it took a full month to withdraw the money back to my account after first requesting it. Keep in mind, this was a no penalty CD which is supposed to allow you to withdraw the money at any time.

Overall it was a terrible experience and I am relieved to have been able to get my money out of that account.