Y’all may recall that a few months ago I fired my local bank after they stole my grocery money.
I took my business down the street to Citizens Bank. A lot of people have pointed out to me that they’re a Big Bad Bank, and I’m sure that is true. They’re doing well enough by me because I am a fairly boring bank customer with good credit. They gave me an overdraft line of credit that they charge interest on but no per-use fee; essentially a credit card linked to my checking account. Fine. I used it once to test the system, and in fact, they did not charge me a fee. The interest on a small overdraft that was repaid 24 hours later was basically not an issue.
That said, I’m not really using them for much except depositing the many small checks and cash payments I receive as a self-employed person. [Speaking of which, dear people who send me checks, I love you. You buy my groceries and pay my phone bill and warm my heart].
I took most of my business to ING Direct. I first opened an account with them about a year ago, after this article at Get Rich Slowly inspired me to get a high interest savings account. The “high interest” part is basically a joke these days, but ING turned out to be a great place for me to save money because I could send dollars there and it was hard to mess with them. They don’t have local branches, and it takes a few days to transfer money from one of their accounts to my local bank. The temptation to raid my savings for “emergencies” like a great band playing downtown vanished.
Using ING, I fell in love with their web interface, and their Incredibly Easy System for managing accounts. It’s almost telepathic. I just gaze at the screen and think about having an account earmarked for our summer travel budget and it appears. OK, it’s not actually that simple. But it feels that simple, which is good enough.
At some point they offered me $50 to open a checking account with them too. Who doesn’t love $50?
So when Wainwright screwed me, what I really did was move most of my banking to my existing but underused ING checking account. I opened the Citizen’s account just so I’d have a local office to walk into and deposit cash, because I’m too old fashioned to mail in my deposits.
This is where that idea gets CRAZY GOOD. When we did this, my husband and I sat down and worked out all of our fixed expenses for the year: our insurance payments, our utilities, our mortgage, our taxes. Everything that comes in regularly and we know in advance how much it will cost.
Then we automated every single one of those payments to withdraw from our ING account, and scheduled a fixed amount of cash to be deposited to the ING account every week to cover those expenses. The rest goes into the Citizens account and we use to buy groceries and birthday gifts and all the little things that are not regular expenses.
My life is so much better since we did this. It’s like I hired ING to be my personal assistant. I give them money, they pay all my bills, and once a week or so we have a little meeting and they tell me how its going. Win!
Related posts:
Pingback: Personal Finances Made Simple — ChildWild
Pingback: Top Money Hacks — ChildWild