A nifty little tool: The bank rater

TheStreet.com has a ratings lookup tool where users can look up thestreet.com's opinion of various entities. You can check their opinion of a stock, or get their idea of the financial stability of your life insurance provider. You can also look up your bank. I discovered this tool a year ago, when the bank failures began (just a trickle at first) - the bank that failed at that time was rated an E- before they failed.

To use the ratings screener, you go to the Banks tab on the Ratings Screener, type in your bank, and hit "Go." Pretty straightforward, except that some banks don't come up by exact name - if your bank doesn't come up, type in the first part of the bank's name and then sift manually through the results. Banks are rated from A to E-, just like academic grades. Personally, I'm wary about keeping my accounts below FDIC limits, but I'd be moving my checking account if I found my bank on the C- or worse list.

If you feel like whiling away a pleasant weekday afternoon, try this:

• Don't enter anything, and hit search (find out how many banks are in the database). I got 12,326.
• Set the rating option to "E" - the worst available rating. I got 332. Not bad - 332 "very weak" banks out of 12,326. Less than 3%.
• Set the rating option to "D" ("weak") and grab the drop-down box next to the rating drop-down - set that one to "or lower". That gets you all the D's and E's in one shot. I get 2,479 banks rated by the street.com as "weak" or worse. Yikes - That's 20% of all the banks they track.

You can play with the ratings screener, sorting by state or bank type, or see which states have the most banks named "Cowboy".

Call me paranoid, but, since I discovered the rater, I've made a point to check my bank's rating every couple of months. They're a B-rated bank, and, so far, they've maintained a solid B average.

And, please - PLEASE, pretty please with sugar on top, please keep your money FDIC insured. Consumers can keep more than $100k covered in a single bank, provided the accounts are titled in multiple names (for example, Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Public could be insured for $100k each, allowing a joint account to reach $200k before exceeding coverage limits). Payable on Death accounts can be covered for $100k per beneficiary - Mr. and Mrs. John Q. could get $400k FDIC coverage by setting up a POD account as "Payable on Death" to their 4 children.