I’m talking about types of accounts, automatic transfers, etc. Feel free to mention specifics, but I’m more interested in higher level information like does your paycheck go to savings or checking, do you use automatic transfers, do you use a traditional bank account or something different, etc.
Basically, what happens to your paycheck? Do you like your process, or are you considering making changes?
Here’s mine:
I have five main accounts:
- Fidelity Bloom Save and Spend for savings and spending respectively; each is a brokerage account
- Fidelity Cash Management Account - mostly fit the fantastic debit card
- Ally Checking and Savings
And here’s the general flow of cash:
- Biweekly paycheck -> Fidelity Save
- Automatic transfer 2x/month from Fidelity Save -> Fidelity Spend
- Automatic transfers from Fidelity Spend -> Ally savings and personal spending accounts
- Automatic transfers from Ally savings to Ally checking; Ally checking is used for Target debit and automatic transfers to wife’s IRA
- Manual transfers as needed to Fidelity Cash Management - I try to keep this near $0, and only transfer for travel or if I need to withdraw from an ATM
I have credit cards and other bills set to autopay in full from my Fidelity Spend account 2x/month (roughly even between the two halves of the month). I changed my credit card due dates to line everything up years ago, so now everything is pretty much automated.
I like this setup because:
- brokerage has higher yielding money market funds
- pretty much everything is automated
- can have investments living next to spending money (e.g. my efund is Treasury bills, which live in my “savings”)
- I keep more sketchy account linkages at a separate institution from my main savings
- I need a brokerage anyway for my HSA, and I’m considering moving my other retirement savings to Fidelity as well to further reduce institutions
- Fidelity has better 2FA options than pretty much any other bank
I used to use Ally as my main account, but I switched to Fidelity late last year and I really like it so far. Some changes I’m planning to make:
- get my hardware security token set up with Fidelity - I’ve been sitting on it for months, just need to make the call
- move wife’s autopay to pull from Fidelity directly; she’s not on the account yet, so I need to fill out some forms
I have my entire paycheck hit my checking, without parceling out some money here and other money there. I avoid auto-pay (and electronic statements for anything that might vary), and instead pay all bills from my bank’s payment portal.
Paper copies of bills go into an in-box, which I process every week or two. I look at all the bills before paying them. There is also a physical piece of paper in the in-box, which is a printout of a spreadsheet I made with all of my monthly and yearly bills. When I pay a bill, I check off the box. Not very hi tech, but it gets the job done.
If I see “extra” money building up in checking, I check the paper, and if it is not needed in the next few months, I shuffle it off to a HYSA. Periodically, I move money from the HYSA to an investment account, which is shoving money into index funds on a set schedule.
Yeah, there’s a lot of manual stuff going on, and if I have a busy month I only get to the bills and not the other stuff. But I feel in better control of all of it, and less likely that I will miss a fraudulent thing happening.
This is pretty much my process too, except I’m not so organized as to have an expenses spreadsheet.
That’s awesome. I know my parents liked that way, and it seems to work well.
Thanks for the input!