IndyMac Failure Leaves Savers in the Cold

Lisa Marshall calls herself a "conservative saver," but even the thrifty have gotten burned in the banking chaos of 2008.

Marshall, a 44-year-old sales professional from Manhattan Beach, Calif., spent several years building up a nest egg for herself and her family. Wary of risks in stock and bond investments, she shopped around for the best rates on certificates of deposit, placing her savings in IndyMac Bank in 2004.

By the time the troubled thrift collapsed on July 11, Marshall had built up enough savings to render the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.'s $100,000 of deposit insurance insufficient to cover all of her funds. Although Congress voted in October to temporarily raise the FDIC insurance cap to $250,000 for each person with a stake in a bank account, for Marshall and thousands of other IndyMac patrons, it was too little, too late.

"Maybe it was a well-known fact among the upper echelon who are really in the financial know, but not among the common people," Marshall says of IndyMac's impending collapse. "I said to myself, 'Let me stuff this [money] away and not invest it in other things,' and then July just hit. Had I known that, I would have gone out and bought a used Maserati."

Millions of Americans have glued their eyes to television screens and news reports this year, anxiously worrying about the fate of their money as banks teetered on the brink of collapse. Twenty-three banks have collapsed, and several others have been acquired or bailed out by the government. But IndyMac seems to be a glaring exception when it comes to customers losing their savings at a major firm.