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I switched to One Finance since their website/app seemed clean (similar to Simple). It has tools for creating multiple "Pockets" that you can spend from. You ca

I switched to One Finance since their website/app seemed clean (similar to Simple). It has tools for creating multiple "Pockets" that you can spend from. You can even setup virtual cards that spend from a specific pocket. I probably won't use any of those features since I use YNAB for managing my money now. I also use HMBradley for savings since they have 3% APY. One Finance also has a 3% "Auto Save" pocket which can do debit card round-ups and up to 10% of your direct deposit. I might use for easy access to move savings into my "Spend" pocket but you can't move money directly into that account, it has to come from direct deposit and only up to 10%. HMB let me dump my emergency fund in and start earning 3% APY which is nice.

sathackr 6y ago
I gave One Finance a try but found their rules and inflexibility incompatible. They don't have a 'joint account' option but claim you can share a pocket with someone else and it works the same. Except when you have an instrument that you need to deposit/credit and it's made out to two people. They won't credit it to the 'shared' pocket because technically that pocket is owned by you, not both. Tried to work with them for a solution but all they could offer was that I could deposit/receive it at another bank and then transfer it. When I closed the account they warned me that once closed I could never come back(they don't allow you to become a customer again in the future if you close your relationship with them). Another odd rule. And no auto transfers and no ability to deposit a paper check(at the time) The benefit wasn't worth the hassle and I moved on.
- joshstrange 6y ago
  Yeah, I can see how that would be a deal breaker. I don't need a joint account and just want a pretty website/app to hold my money so for me it fit the bill. I appreciate how the One Finance team is active on their subreddit and seem to be pretty good at communicating the roadmap with the community. But I totally get that it didn't work for you.
- anomaloustho 6y ago
  Curious to hear which bank you’re using now. Especially since I haven’t found a great Simple-like bank that supports joint accounts.
  - sathackr 6y ago
    Wound up going to PNC. Since they bought Simple I'm hoping the features will trickle to their customers. What they have now is close enough for now. Similar but there are 3 "pockets" -- two checking and one savings. And they have auto transfer. (One has auto transfer now also) Bills/utilities/relatively fixed costs come from one pocket, dining/entertainment/variable costs from the other. Excess is moved manually every couple months to savings.
linsomniac 6y ago
I also switched to One Finance, just over a month ago, and so far I really like it. I also started using YNAB almost a month ago to try to help with the budgeting things I was getting from Simple but aren't really there in One. Kind of unconvinced about YNAB, I want something that does more "autopilot with corrections", but YNAB seems to be "everything manual so you know where your money is going".
- zo1 6y ago
  I used to use YNAB before it was a "web app", and it was pretty auto-pilot after setting up the imports/rules. It classified 98%+ of all my expenses and inter-account transfers without any issue. Every once in a while you had to classify a new transaction but that was rare after a while. Anyways, the ones that are rare like that are usually once-offs and you're already making notes next to them so you know what it was for.
  - linsomniac 6y ago
    Maybe I'm misunderstanding something, but I've watched several tutorials... The workflow seems to be: Every time you get paid, you go in and assign your money to your budget. This is the "make every dollar work for you" part. But that involves going to each non-green line item and adding some amount of your remaining money to that item. It doesn't really have an idea of when expenses are due (though you can set up dates on goals, but multiple tutorials I watched recommended putting the due date in the name, so you can manually sort the items. It also doesn't have an idea of when you get paid. So it can't do things like: "You're going to need to pay your mortgage of $X in 2 pay periods, so let's allocate $X/2 of this paycheck to the mortgage expense. In fact, it doesn't support even "add the remaining amount for this expense", so you're going around typing the dollar values of different expenses. I understand that this is part of their design to get people more familiar with their money and where it's going. Maybe if I was waaaay off track, and really pressed for money, that would be valuable. But I'm 90% on track, my worries are kind of higher level. Again, maybe I'm misunderstanding something. But I've watched hours worth of tutorials, by YNAB and others, so I've at least done some level of research. :-)
maxov 6y ago
This may be unfounded, but I am pretty skeptical of any bank or service that offers such high APY for a savings account. The effective federal funds rate is now about 0.6%, and Wealthfront is really clear in their communications on how the interest on their cash account is directly tied to that rate. More generally, although I am not an expert, I am not sure how any bank will be able to maintain interest rates that high without somehow making money off you, or coaxing you into doing something that is actually profitable for them, when you don't see it. Especially because if they actually want to call their account a checking account, they are subject to the same legal imitations (amount in reserve, ability to make loans) as other banks. Looking at One Finance and HMBradley, these 3% APY accounts seem to only be added to as a percentage of your direct deposit paycheck. For HMBradley, that rate only seems to kick in if you save 20% or more of your paycheck each month. I am not a financial advisor, but this seems way more than anyone should be keeping in cash. Main reason being you should only keep it for liquidity and emergencies and nothing else, because otherwise you're basically losing money to inflation. The median American household makes $60k and has a net worth of $120k. The standard financial advice is to have an emergency fund to cover about 6 months of expenses, which we can say conservatively (adding in any other cash people keep) would be maybe $30k. To stay at that level with about 1/4 net worth in cash, you should save 25% in cash after expenses. The most common budgeting rule is 50% (needs)/30% (wants)/20 %(savings), meaning that to stay "even" you'd actually want to save at most 4% of your paycheck in cash (this way, 25% of your net worth growth will be in cash). This is not even enough for the lowest HMBradley tier of 0.50% APY. I think all the assumptions I made are pretty conservative, namely that expenses grow linearly with income. I'm going to guess that if you're higher income (eg 2x median) your expenses will not be (they will maybe be up to 50% higher), so you should save even less to keep your emergency fund. Therefore 25% of net worth in cash seems to be a pretty good rule of thumb, if even too high for higher net worth households. You don't bump into that unless your total spending is 20% of your paycheck each month (the number of people like that must be really small). So one way or another, you're losing pretty significantly keeping that much in cash.
- joshstrange 6y ago
  I’m pretty sure I agree with all your points, that’s why I don’t use HMB as anything more than a place to keep my emergency funds and get a high interest rate. I direct a small portion of my paycheck via direct deposit and that’s enough to trigger their logic to activate the saving rate (you are required to have DD). HMB is better than One’s “Auto Save” pocket because I can move in money at anytime and it qualifies for the saving rate vs One having to only come from DD (you can’t move money into that pocket). Edit: With the way I only send a small % of my paycheck to HMB, I don’t have to care about saving X% since according to their calculations I’m always saving 100% of my “paycheck”. The rest of my paycheck goes to One Financial where I use it as-needed without worrying about disqualifying myself from a higher saving tier.
webinvest 6y ago
I found that with One finance, you couldn’t pull money from any accounts linked with just a routing number and an account number. That was a dealbreaker because I don’t type banking usernames and passwords into other websites for security reasons.
- joshstrange 6y ago
  You can always fall back to linking via Routing/Account number I'm pretty sure. Just enter "fake" in the Plaid search box for banks (or any string that don't match a real bank) and they will give you an option to link via Routing/Account number. Here is a short video: https://www.dropbox.com/s/dtps42rl2jmm7lw/Screen%20Recording%202021-05-10%20at%2012.52.34%20PM.mov?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/dtps42rl2jmm7lw/Screen%20Recording...
  - webinvest 5y ago
    Okay, you are correct.

sathackr 6y ago

I gave One Finance a try but found their rules and inflexibility incompatible. They don't have a 'joint account' option but claim you can share a pocket with someone else and it works the same. Except when you have an instrument that you need to deposit/credit and it's made out to two people. They won't credit it to the 'shared' pocket because technically that pocket is owned by you, not both. Tried to work with them for a solution but all they could offer was that I could deposit/receive it at another bank and then transfer it. When I closed the account they warned me that once closed I could never come back(they don't allow you to become a customer again in the future if you close your relationship with them). Another odd rule. And no auto transfers and no ability to deposit a paper check(at the time) The benefit wasn't worth the hassle and I moved on.

joshstrange 6y ago
Yeah, I can see how that would be a deal breaker. I don't need a joint account and just want a pretty website/app to hold my money so for me it fit the bill. I appreciate how the One Finance team is active on their subreddit and seem to be pretty good at communicating the roadmap with the community. But I totally get that it didn't work for you.
anomaloustho 6y ago
Curious to hear which bank you’re using now. Especially since I haven’t found a great Simple-like bank that supports joint accounts.
- sathackr 6y ago
  Wound up going to PNC. Since they bought Simple I'm hoping the features will trickle to their customers. What they have now is close enough for now. Similar but there are 3 "pockets" -- two checking and one savings. And they have auto transfer. (One has auto transfer now also) Bills/utilities/relatively fixed costs come from one pocket, dining/entertainment/variable costs from the other. Excess is moved manually every couple months to savings.

linsomniac 6y ago

I also switched to One Finance, just over a month ago, and so far I really like it. I also started using YNAB almost a month ago to try to help with the budgeting things I was getting from Simple but aren't really there in One. Kind of unconvinced about YNAB, I want something that does more "autopilot with corrections", but YNAB seems to be "everything manual so you know where your money is going".

zo1 6y ago
I used to use YNAB before it was a "web app", and it was pretty auto-pilot after setting up the imports/rules. It classified 98%+ of all my expenses and inter-account transfers without any issue. Every once in a while you had to classify a new transaction but that was rare after a while. Anyways, the ones that are rare like that are usually once-offs and you're already making notes next to them so you know what it was for.
- linsomniac 6y ago
  Maybe I'm misunderstanding something, but I've watched several tutorials... The workflow seems to be: Every time you get paid, you go in and assign your money to your budget. This is the "make every dollar work for you" part. But that involves going to each non-green line item and adding some amount of your remaining money to that item. It doesn't really have an idea of when expenses are due (though you can set up dates on goals, but multiple tutorials I watched recommended putting the due date in the name, so you can manually sort the items. It also doesn't have an idea of when you get paid. So it can't do things like: "You're going to need to pay your mortgage of $X in 2 pay periods, so let's allocate $X/2 of this paycheck to the mortgage expense. In fact, it doesn't support even "add the remaining amount for this expense", so you're going around typing the dollar values of different expenses. I understand that this is part of their design to get people more familiar with their money and where it's going. Maybe if I was waaaay off track, and really pressed for money, that would be valuable. But I'm 90% on track, my worries are kind of higher level. Again, maybe I'm misunderstanding something. But I've watched hours worth of tutorials, by YNAB and others, so I've at least done some level of research. :-)

maxov 6y ago

This may be unfounded, but I am pretty skeptical of any bank or service that offers such high APY for a savings account. The effective federal funds rate is now about 0.6%, and Wealthfront is really clear in their communications on how the interest on their cash account is directly tied to that rate. More generally, although I am not an expert, I am not sure how any bank will be able to maintain interest rates that high without somehow making money off you, or coaxing you into doing something that is actually profitable for them, when you don't see it. Especially because if they actually want to call their account a checking account, they are subject to the same legal imitations (amount in reserve, ability to make loans) as other banks. Looking at One Finance and HMBradley, these 3% APY accounts seem to only be added to as a percentage of your direct deposit paycheck. For HMBradley, that rate only seems to kick in if you save 20% or more of your paycheck each month. I am not a financial advisor, but this seems way more than anyone should be keeping in cash. Main reason being you should only keep it for liquidity and emergencies and nothing else, because otherwise you're basically losing money to inflation. The median American household makes $60k and has a net worth of $120k. The standard financial advice is to have an emergency fund to cover about 6 months of expenses, which we can say conservatively (adding in any other cash people keep) would be maybe $30k. To stay at that level with about 1/4 net worth in cash, you should save 25% in cash after expenses. The most common budgeting rule is 50% (needs)/30% (wants)/20 %(savings), meaning that to stay "even" you'd actually want to save at most 4% of your paycheck in cash (this way, 25% of your net worth growth will be in cash). This is not even enough for the lowest HMBradley tier of 0.50% APY. I think all the assumptions I made are pretty conservative, namely that expenses grow linearly with income. I'm going to guess that if you're higher income (eg 2x median) your expenses will not be (they will maybe be up to 50% higher), so you should save even less to keep your emergency fund. Therefore 25% of net worth in cash seems to be a pretty good rule of thumb, if even too high for higher net worth households. You don't bump into that unless your total spending is 20% of your paycheck each month (the number of people like that must be really small). So one way or another, you're losing pretty significantly keeping that much in cash.

joshstrange 6y ago
I’m pretty sure I agree with all your points, that’s why I don’t use HMB as anything more than a place to keep my emergency funds and get a high interest rate. I direct a small portion of my paycheck via direct deposit and that’s enough to trigger their logic to activate the saving rate (you are required to have DD). HMB is better than One’s “Auto Save” pocket because I can move in money at anytime and it qualifies for the saving rate vs One having to only come from DD (you can’t move money into that pocket). Edit: With the way I only send a small % of my paycheck to HMB, I don’t have to care about saving X% since according to their calculations I’m always saving 100% of my “paycheck”. The rest of my paycheck goes to One Financial where I use it as-needed without worrying about disqualifying myself from a higher saving tier.

webinvest 6y ago

I found that with One finance, you couldn’t pull money from any accounts linked with just a routing number and an account number. That was a dealbreaker because I don’t type banking usernames and passwords into other websites for security reasons.

joshstrange 6y ago
You can always fall back to linking via Routing/Account number I'm pretty sure. Just enter "fake" in the Plaid search box for banks (or any string that don't match a real bank) and they will give you an option to link via Routing/Account number. Here is a short video: https://www.dropbox.com/s/dtps42rl2jmm7lw/Screen%20Recording%202021-05-10%20at%2012.52.34%20PM.mov?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/dtps42rl2jmm7lw/Screen%20Recording...
- webinvest 5y ago
  Okay, you are correct.