Household Plays It Safe With New Customers : Finance: Account holders acquired from failed Imperial are asked to sign a letter saying they know their money is in the bank, and that they want to keep it there.

Household Bank doesn’t want to alarm some new customers it picked up with its acquisition of 48 branches of failed Imperial Savings & Loan of San Diego, but it does want them to acknowledge what seems obvious: their accounts can remain at Household.

In recent letters to 40,000 former Imperial depositors who have $1.4 billion in Household accounts, Household has asked them to sign a form that states, essentially, that they know where their money is and that they want to keep it there.

If those depositors fail to take some minimal action by October, 1992, Newport Beach-based Household said in letters sent to the new customers, they could lose their money to the federal government.

The Resolution Trust Corp., the federal agency that manages and liquidates failed S&Ls;, calls Household’s notice “alarmist” because the deadline is still 15 months away.

But Household worries about facing a similar situation to that it faces in Baltimore, where it acquired a failed institution from the RTC about 15 months ago. From that transaction, about $36 million in 10,000 accounts could revert to the RTC in October and leave insured depositors with little more than unsecured claims in a failed thrift’s liquidation.

“We feel a much stronger sense of urgency in Baltimore than we do in California,” said Dinah Keefe, a Household spokeswoman. “Despite letters and telephone calls, depositors in Baltimore are not getting the message.”

Although there’s “nothing to worry about in California” yet, Keefe said, Household wants former Imperial customers, who brought in $2.9 billion in deposits, to give written approval to have their accounts transferred to Household.

But RTC spokeswoman Kate Spears says that’s unnecessary. The agency is concerned about the situation in Baltimore, she says, but is more critical of Household’s notice to former Imperial customers.

Spears said the notice contains legal terms that could be confusing. Customers, she pointed out, don’t have to “ratify” their accounts by signing some statement, as the notice suggests. If the thrift sends monthly or quarterly statements to depositors, and the mail isn’t returned, the depositors will be deemed to have “claimed” their accounts, which is all they need to do to protect their money, she said.

Many customers already have approved the transfer, without knowing it, simply by making a deposit, withdrawal or other transaction, Keefe and Spears said. But the thrift is concerned mainly with accounts where there is little activity--certificates of deposit that roll over into new CDs automatically and individual retirement accounts.

“Household is going out with a notice saying, essentially, that it’s better to have people do too much than too little,” Spears said.