Did you know that Wachovia is showing a $9 billion loss as of June? Is your bank losing money? How can you find out? You could find some financial statements on the annual report but there is an even better place to check out your bank.
Let’s say you want to know how Bank of America is doing. The following website has detailed financial statements for all bank holding companies and provides comparisons of your bank versus other banks of the same size: http://www.ffiec.gov/reports.htm.
Once in this website I will go to Performance and click on Bank Holding Company Performance. This will take me to a form where I enter in the name of my bank (Bank of America) and the city and state where the holding company is located. At the bottom select the Holding Company option. After you submit your bank's name you might get a list of banks with similar names and you need to find yours. Once you have correctly selected your bank you will next see another form. Under the first option for Bank Holding Company select the date of the reports and then select Create Reports.
You now have a report filled with financial information. To find out if your bank is profitable go to page 2 for the Income Statement - Revenue and Expenses. At the bottom of the page is Net Income, which is the profit and over in the far right is the percentage change in the past year and 5 years. In my example, Bank of America, this bank's profit has dropped 58% in the past year. Ouch! But at least it is still showing a profit.
Back on page 1, Summary Ratios, the first paragraph again shows Net Income but this is the bank's Net Income as a percent of assets. The higher the number, the better. For Bank of America, their Net Income is .53 which wouldn't really mean much to me until I see in the next column that it's peer bank's have a Net Income of .47. So I feel a bit better knowing my bank is outperforming its peers. Although everybody is much lower than a year ago.
Congress is currently working on a bill to buy bad loans from banks. Does your bank carry a lot of bad loans? The second grouping in the Summary Ratios report is for Losses and its first line shows your bank's loan losses as a percentage of all of your bank's loans. Obviously you want to have a very low percentage. Bank of America's loan losses are 1.40% of its loans which are almost twice as high as the 0.79% for its peers. The scary part is that a year ago only 0.77% of loans were bad for this bank.
This report is filled with financial data and you could spend hours looking at it all. But just by reviewing a few things anyone with money in Bank of America should feel somewhat better. Not like customers at Wachovia, but then again, I would not know it lost over $9.5 billion unless I checked the bank out here. I highly recommend that you review your bank's financial statement. The more informed you are, the better financial decisions you can make to protect your money.
Let’s say you want to know how Bank of America is doing. The following website has detailed financial statements for all bank holding companies and provides comparisons of your bank versus other banks of the same size: http://www.ffiec.gov/reports.htm.
Once in this website I will go to Performance and click on Bank Holding Company Performance. This will take me to a form where I enter in the name of my bank (Bank of America) and the city and state where the holding company is located. At the bottom select the Holding Company option. After you submit your bank's name you might get a list of banks with similar names and you need to find yours. Once you have correctly selected your bank you will next see another form. Under the first option for Bank Holding Company select the date of the reports and then select Create Reports.
You now have a report filled with financial information. To find out if your bank is profitable go to page 2 for the Income Statement - Revenue and Expenses. At the bottom of the page is Net Income, which is the profit and over in the far right is the percentage change in the past year and 5 years. In my example, Bank of America, this bank's profit has dropped 58% in the past year. Ouch! But at least it is still showing a profit.
Back on page 1, Summary Ratios, the first paragraph again shows Net Income but this is the bank's Net Income as a percent of assets. The higher the number, the better. For Bank of America, their Net Income is .53 which wouldn't really mean much to me until I see in the next column that it's peer bank's have a Net Income of .47. So I feel a bit better knowing my bank is outperforming its peers. Although everybody is much lower than a year ago.
Congress is currently working on a bill to buy bad loans from banks. Does your bank carry a lot of bad loans? The second grouping in the Summary Ratios report is for Losses and its first line shows your bank's loan losses as a percentage of all of your bank's loans. Obviously you want to have a very low percentage. Bank of America's loan losses are 1.40% of its loans which are almost twice as high as the 0.79% for its peers. The scary part is that a year ago only 0.77% of loans were bad for this bank.
This report is filled with financial data and you could spend hours looking at it all. But just by reviewing a few things anyone with money in Bank of America should feel somewhat better. Not like customers at Wachovia, but then again, I would not know it lost over $9.5 billion unless I checked the bank out here. I highly recommend that you review your bank's financial statement. The more informed you are, the better financial decisions you can make to protect your money.
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