Hi Rick,

I wasn't looking to do a "cash out", I just wanted to finance what I paid
for the plane, or some significant portion thereof. I live in Wilmington,
the banks headquarters, and one of my customers happens to have run this
department until he retired, about two years ago He wasn't that surprised
with my story. When he ran the department, particularly a loan of this
size, that would not have to go to loan committee, he would have approved it
on the spot. Maybe I just got the wrong represintative. I wish I had
talked with the one you worked with. I have a lot of customers and friends
who are senior MBNA executives, I could probably make a call, and I'm
pretty sure I would get the financing. But I don't want to do that. They
are either going to be easy to work with or not, and if they are this
inflexible up front who knows how bad they will be during the life of the
loan. Several years ago I had a similar experience with their credit card
department. I needed a short term loan to cover income taxes. I decided to
do a cash advance off of my MBNA card at our local bank. When I got my
statement the next month from MBNA I was surprised to see a $900 surcharge,
in addition to the 21% interest they charge. Needless to say I was a little
annoyed. I called them to discuss the charge and have it reduced or
hopefully removed. They wouldn't, even after I kicked the complaint up
several levels. So I closed the account on the spot and paid off the card.
I swore I never would use MBNA again (so much for me resolution!) Now they
were certainly within their rights to charge me that. I had apparently
agreed to it. But in the long run they lost a good customer because of
their inflexibility, and lack of customer focus. In discussing that
particular incident with some of my credit card customers from other credit
card banks in Wilmington, they told me that their banks would probably have
removed the $900 fee, and kept the customer happy. Who knows?

I agree with you as well that I have found AOPA's approved vendors to be
generally excellent as well. This MBNA deal is the exception. Maybe MBNA
was having a bad day the day I called? I wrote AOPA last week about this
and other than an automatic reply I haven't heard word one from them yet.
I'm sure they get a lot of emails from their members, so I will be curious
to hear what their thoughts are when they respond.

Charlie

"Rick Beebe" wrote in message
...
I wanted to relate an interesting story. I purchased a small single
engine
Piper in January of this year through my business. At the time I had
extra
cash in the business, so rather than finance it, I decided just to use
the
cash and then
perhaps put the financing in place later.

Well the later turned out to be yesterday. I decided to try MBNA based
upon
AOPA's recommendation, so I called MBNA. and inquired about the
financing.
Generally I have found AOPA's approved affiliates to be excellent, and
very
customer service orientated. This was not the case with MBNA. To my
surprise the MBNA representative told me they could not finance a plane
that
wasn't an actual purchase. I didn't really understand why, and asked him
to

I'll offer a counterpoint to this. I bought my plane 3 years ago for cash.
6 months ago I decided to "refinance" so I could update my radio stack. I
used MBNA and they were a pleasure to deal with. They gave me a better
rate and offered to finance more of the plane than Dorr or the other ones
I talked to. One difference in our stories--I did finance more than the
cost of the stack and used the extra to pay off a home equity line so as
far as they were concerned it was a refinance and not just taking cash out
of the plane. Still, they were great to work with. Maybe the Bank of
America merger has addled their brains. The bank where I have my checking
and savings accounts recently became BoA. Now I get half the services for
twice the fees.

--Rick