Half a croissant, on a plate, with a sign in front of it saying '50c'
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Account Split-Balancing

One bank account, infinite pools of money.
  (+18, -1)(+18, -1)
(+18, -1)
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Basically, when you open your chequings or savings you can add "labels" to separate pools of money. For example, in your chequings account you might label "rent" and alot $500.00 to it, which you could set that label as "untouchable". Then you could have another label called "play", and set it to "debit-enabled/withdrawl-enabled", and you could even have another labeled "saving for a t.v." which you would leave as debit and withdrawl disabled until you save enough and you were on your way to purchase the t.v. This would prevent you from spending money you were trying to save (for rent or t.v.) without the need for 3 separate accounts.

Likewise a Savings account could use similar labels for saving for a car, college-fund, mutual-funds etc. Going online to check your bank accounts you could have a nice pie chart of each account on the side that showed how much was in each label.

If you got direct deposit, you could (instead of selecting a pre-determined amount like 200.00) select a %. 50% of my paycheck gets labeled rent, 20% t.v. and 30% play.

Today i think most people would benefit from this cause it would almost force you to save, by eliminating spending your "T.v." label, or whatever you were saving for at the time, whereas most young people i know just blow their money, and then blow the credit card's money after that.

ned, Sep 09 2005

SoFi money”vaults” https://support.sof...2-SoFi-Money-Vaults
Segmenting your saving accounts [a1, Feb 08 2023]

[link]






       Gets my vote - I've long wanted a way to segregate money I've written checks against from ATM withdrawals and debit card payments, without the hassle of extra accounts.
DrCurry, Sep 09 2005
  

       This Idea is a budget.
reensure, Sep 10 2005
  

       What's wrong with multiple accounts?
Detly, Sep 11 2005
  

       Beats me. Nearly everyone who is able to read these annotations probably has access to either Quicken or Money software, both of which do an excellent job of tracking assets and expenditures through multiple accounts and financial entities, and providing a tidy summary with beautiful pie charts.   

       And with the ready availability of regular automatic electronic fund transfers from your single checking account into any designated investment fund or account at your preferred brokerage, it really doesn't seem to be a very big problem. At home on your own computer, all one has to do is parenthetically add "TV Fund" to the name of their Vanguard Short-Term Bond Fund or "College Fund" to their Fidelity Spartan 500 Index fund inside of Quicken to achieve the purpose. If you do all of your trading within one fund family, many will allow you to make a single weekly/monthly/annual contribution to your "core" account, and then specify percentage allocations to the investment vehicles you have pre-selected. With a bit of careful picking and choosing among no load funds, investment periods, and the amounts committed for each transaction, much of this trading can be accomplished without fees.   

       Even though this may not be the way you are currently managing your money, it really doesn't seem to be new ground.   

       (Incidentally, as a disclaimer, I do not own shares in either of the two funds named above as of this writing, nor am I in any way employed by or professionally affiliated with any brokerage or fund family.)
jurist, Sep 11 2005
  

       I think this would be an excellent gimmick for an online bank. Not sure you could enable/disable pots of money to be for direct debit in the same account, but the nice thing is that this would benefit both parties - you get a prettily laid-out budget setup, and the bank manager gets a big fat wodge of information about how you spend your money. Even though it goes against the grain to give banks more information about me, I still like this.
moomintroll, Sep 11 2005
  

       //What's wrong with multiple accounts?//   

       With the multi-split single account, you don't get bounced checks (and the associated fees) if one account goes negative unless the aggregate goes negative.
supercat, Sep 12 2005
  

       And there I was hoping for an idea which would give me infinate amounts of money.   

       //1 bank account, infinate pools of money.//   

       Good idea anyway though. Bun from me for the possibility of a simpler life.
Germanicus, Sep 12 2005
  

       jurist.. neither of your suggestions help any of the problems this unbaked freshness has to solve. Mutual funds are completely different from bank accounts. That ends that... as for quicken and M$ Money or whatever, those are for budgeting your overall money, which is great, but it doesn't STOP you from spending anything.. and most importantly, those programs have no control over where your direct deposited (sp?) paycheck goes. They merely show where your money should go (or where you want it to go).   

       Labeling would rule, but i think the only thing holding it back is the fact that internet-illiterates would have just one more thing to learn in order to use internet banking, which is what most banks are desperately trying to get clients to do more of their services through.
ned, Sep 13 2005
  

       I was driving to work and I thought of this exact idea. I thought I should post it on HalfBakery for all to marvel at my glorious brain. But like most everything, it had been already posted.   

       Anyways, everyone who says we need to budget, well yeah. That's exactly what ned is trying to accomplish, and in the easiest way possible. I'd rather just have folders/labels in my single bank account than try to manage it by sync'ing it with QuickBooks or opening multiple accounts that require extra paper and may or may not overdraw nicely.   

       The thing is, this has absolutely no financial ramifications to your money. Think of it as folders in your email. You have yourname @ yourdomain.com but once you download it, Outlook or Thunderbird organizes it into nice folders by auto mail filters or manually. Why can't I do that with the money I have? The fact that you moved some email from Work to Home folder in Outlook should have no impact on the emails you receive at or send from yourname @ yourdomain.com and similarly, it doesn't really matter to the bank or the financial institution if your "Saving for Europe" folder goes to zero as long as every folder has $0 or above and your total account has the minimum $ required.   

       I know my bank (Wachovia) already offers a VERY extensive OneStop interface via Yodlee for free on my free checking account. So I know they have detailed tools and are willing to provide them to their customers. I'd say this is a wonderful idea that just hasn't been implemented for some reason. Could be patents or just lack of motivation. Who knows. But I'd absolutely love it if my bank gave this. And I'd switch to another bank if they gave this to me.
chime, Feb 14 2006
  

       //withdrawl// is autological.
spidermother, Feb 15 2006
  

       SoFi bank offers something very much like this (link).
a1, Feb 08 2023
  

       [+] for //infinite pools of money//
pocmloc, Feb 08 2023
  

       I haven't found a bank willing to make a dozen separate accounts for me without charging a dozen monthly fees. [+]
Voice, Feb 08 2023
  

       // I haven't found a bank willing to make a dozen separate accounts for me without charging a dozen monthly fees. //   

       I have several bank accounts and none of them charge fees - though the most I have at any one bank is three accounts.   

       SoFi doesn't offer multiple accounts but their "vault" feature works pretty much like [ned]'s original suggestion - they even offer a similar rationale for it.
a1, Feb 08 2023
  
      
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