Would you withdraw your money from your bank if you thought it was going under?
There's obviously a lot of discussion surrounding your question, but if I thought a bank was going under, then yes, absolutely I would withdraw my money. Now, we can debate whether me thinking the bank was going under was foolish or not, but if I truly believed it, I can't see why I would sit around and do nothing. If the FDIC didn't insure your deposit, there would be a run on EVERY bank, so there is no way the government will let it fail or go broke.  It will be backstopped one way or another.  So I wouldn't worry about losing my money.   The only worry is the hassle of having to deal with the bank failure and getting at your money and getting it out.  There could be a few days of illiquidity while the government is stepping in to sort things out.  If that scares you or would be a big problem, then I'd find a safer choice. I have two different thoughts on this subject. I probably would not take it out, since I have enough layers of backstops: Maybe if I could find a better rate. :) "To the average consumer, the financial health of a bank is completely irrelevant.  The FDIC's job is to make it that way.  Even if a bank does go under, the FDIC is very good at making sure there is little/no interruption in service.  Usually, another bank just takes over the asset of the failing bank, and you don't even notice the difference.  You might have a ~24 hour window where your local ATM doesn't work. I also really question the ""FDIC is broke"" statement.  The FDIC has access to additional funding beyond the Deposit Insurance Fund mentioned in your link.  It also has the ability to borrow from the Treasury. If you look into the FDIC's report a bit closer, the amount in the ""Provision for Insurance Losses"" is not just money spent on failing banks.  It also includes money that has been set aside to cover anticipated failures and litigation.  Saying the FDIC is ""broke"" is like saying I am ""broke"" because my checking account balance went down after I moved some money into a rainy-day fund. Failure of the FDIC would signal a failure of our financial system and the government that backs it.  If the FDIC fails, your petty checking account would be meaningless anyway.  The important things would be non-perishable food, clean water, and guns/ammo. That said, it will be interesting to see the latest quarterly report for the FDIC when it is released next week.  The article implies things will look a little better for the FDIC, but we'll see." The article you link scares me; but I still have faith that the FDIC will keep me protected.  Personally, if the FDIC goes broke, there is something more fundamentally wrong with the government as a whole and dollars won't worry me much. There are lots of issues with the FDIC, and I think the answers lie outside of simply printing more money and funding the FDIC further.  There is likely more bad before this storm is over, and I might be ignorant, but I still want to operate normally. My money would stay where it is with things being how I see them in today
A routing number and account number are on the bottom of every check. If anybody who ever handled your checks or even saw your checks could just withdraw as much money as they wanted, the whole banking system would need to be reworked. In short, just having that info is not enough. Not legally. "Definitely this. The fact that it's termed ""identity theft"" is a great PR spin for banks. Someone else is attempting transactions while fraudulently claiming to be you. You did not lose your identity or even a piece of it. You are still fully you.  You are not even involved in the fraudulent transaction! It's a transaction between the bank and the fraudster, and the bank has agreed to some action you did not authorize. They should be responsible for cleanup." If thats how you feel (its how I feel )  then the last thing you want bankers doing is accepting deposits from people who think their money is not being risked, then making loans with it (fractional reserve banking).  And fdic is not an answer to that fundamental problem. Anyone with a background in finance should have been well aware that the government would swoop in with a bailout of the major banks. Such a scenario was even discussed in money and banking textbooks pre financial crisis.   Since I have no excess cash,  and wad in senior year of college, I was unable to capitalize on that, but I did invest in the banks in market simulating games 😁 And then there is the issue of people who actually don't intend to reduce the size of their loan. They only want to pay the interest, so their debt with the bank remains constant. If you are upside down, it means you will not have the financial means to remove the debt. If, for some reason, you are no longer able to pay the bank, you might lose the house. After that you will have no house, but you still have a debt with the bank. So ... how are you going to have a bank run if you got rid of cash? I suspect big investors will attempt (have already attempted?) to pull their cash, but regular people? Not like running to the ATM will do much good and I don't think they have offshore accounts.  Excuse my naïveté, but that's the first thing that came to my mind... You are losing something - interest on your deposit.  That money you are giving to the bank is not earning interest so you are losing money considering inflation is eating into it. Yes, but it's a matter of paper trail and lifestyle. Your $600K guy may get questioned when he makes the deposit, but would show the record of having that money elsewhere. People buy cars with cash (a check) all the time. The guy filing a tax return claiming little to no income or no return at all, is more likely to get flagged than the $100K+ earning couple who happened to be able to save to buy their $25K car every 10 years with cash.  On reading the article, the bank had its own concerns. The guy who was trying to withdraw the money was elderly, and the bank seemed pretty concerned to make sure he wasn't about to be scammed. It may not be spelled out as such, but a custodian of one's money does have an obligation to not be party to a potential scam, and the very request for such a huge sum of money in cash is a red flag. I quit diligently reconciling monthly statements some years before everything was online, when I realized that for years before that, every time I thought I found a mistake, it was always my own error. I was spending a fair amount of time (over the years) doing something that wasn't helping me. So I quit. That said, I do look at the statements and/or check the transactions on a regular basis (I now use email notifications of automatic deposits as the trigger, and then look over withdrawals, too) to make sure everything looks appropriate. I'm less concerned about a bank error than I am about identity or account theft. It seems possible if the Euro is partially/entirely unwound that policies could be enacted to prohibit exactly this behavior, otherwise what will stop outflow to the stronger countries on a massive scale? (Thus amplifying the resulting decade-long clusterfuck)  We've never had this situation in Europe before, and already for Greece and Spain there are suggestions to instigate withdrawal controls. It doesn't seem far fetched to imagine retroactive controls placed on private deposits in newly-foreign-currency banks.  If I were concerned about the Euro's collapse I'd be more inclined to move assets out of the eurozone entirely "These have the potential to become ""end-of-the-world"" scenarios, so I'll keep this very clear. If you start to feel that any particular investment may suddenly become worthless then it is wise to liquidate that asset and transfer your wealth somewhere else. If your wealth happens to be invested in cash then transferring that wealth into something else is still valid.  Digging a hole in the ground isn't useful and running for the border probably won't be necessary. Consider countries that have suffered actual currency collapse and debt default.  Take Zimbabwe, for example.  Even as inflation went into the millions of percent, the Zimbabwe stock exchange soared as investors were prepared to spend ever-more of their devaluing currency to buy stable stocks in a small number of locally listed companies. Even if the Euro were to suffer a critical fall, European companies would probably be ok. If you didn't panic and dig caches in the back garden over the fall of dotcom, there is no need to panic over the decline of certain currencies.  Just diversify your risk and buy non-cash (or euro) assets. Update: A few ideas re diversification: The problem for Greece isn't really a euro problem; it is local. Local property, local companies ... these can be affected by default because no-one believes in the entirety of the Greek economy, not just the currency it happens to be using - so diversification really means buying things that are outside Greece." It's the equivalent of you being required to keep some of your savings in a near-zero percent interest savings account vs. being able to invest and grow that capital.   Even if the capital requirements were peeled back slightly, (most) banks still hold more than enough capital to absorb extreme losses.  Net/net the economy is safer, but less robust than it could be. Sometimes I think it helps to think of the scenario in reverse. If you had a completely paid off car, would you take out a title loan (even at 0%) for a few months to put the cash in a low-interest savings account? For me, I think the risk of losing the car due to non-payment outweighs the tens of dollars I might earn. One can't, this is a systemic problem and when One bank goes pop, it drags a couple down with it. While swaps should have worked to keep the system safe at one time, when money was real, they now act as anchors that drag the entire chain down because the volume of funny money debt is so great its just not ever getting paid back. Best bet is to burn the Fed down Yes, there is such possibility. Also, there's a possibility people made your computer, your operation system, your browser, etc. put there some code there that would intercept your communications and steal your money. So could bank clerks (and unlike all other examples, this really happened in real world, numerous times, though usually at smaller banks), ATM makers, etc.  In the modern world, you rely on things made by thousands of people, this is a part of modern world's conveniences. You don't have to use it - you can store all your money in a big jar in your basement and nobody but occasional thief breaking in could take it.  However, fraudulent unauthorized transactions in most banks can be rolled back, and any transaction is reported to you. So fraud from mint.com people would be quite low on my list of risks. Much bigger risk is that somebody could break into mint.com servers and steal information about your accounts from there or install some malicious code. I believe they have good protections, but no security system is perfect. You need to evaluate how the convenience of using mint.com compares to your personal feeling about this risk. If you feel you couldn't sleep at night knowing somewhere out there there is information about your money - don't use it. I don't worry about it too much as I know the chance of it happening is low and the chance of getting the money back if it happens is high, but if you feel differently - don't do it.