I'm a simple customer. My finances are strange. As a student supported primarily through research grants/TAships, at the beginning of the semester, I have my e

I'm a simple customer. My finances are strange. As a student supported primarily through research grants/TAships, at the beginning of the semester, I have my entire paycheck for half of a year deposited into my account. This makes my budgeting problematic: my "total account balance" would show far more than what I would like to allocate myself for each month. I don't want to get out the pen-and-paper or Emacs' calc just to see whether I could go out to dinner that night. Here's how Simple addresses this: A giant "Safe-to-spend" number is shown at the top of every page on the website. This "Safe-to-spend" number is defined as your total account balance minus the amount you've allocated to "spending goals", which are tags/buckets that contain money, similar to an old envelope accounting system. When I'm paid for half the year, I move all of the balance to a "Stipend" goal and never touch it again. My Safe-to-spend now shows as $0. Every month, I manually log in and move a monthly amount out of the "Stipend" goal/bucket and into my "Safe-to-spend." I then treat that as my "monthly paycheck", and then allocate that money to goals such as "Rent", "Cell phone bill", "Food", and etc., usually leaving a few hundred dollars in my safe-to-spend as a margin and so I can watch how my finances change on a small scale. When it's time to pay rent, the transaction hits my Simple account. This makes my "Safe-to-spend" immediately drop to 0 (really negative), indicating that I've spent some money that should have been allocated to goals. When I notice this, I log in and tag the big rent transaction as "Rent", which empties out the "Rent" bucket and pushes the Safe-To-Spend back to positive. It's a great way of planning my spending in advance, which is one of the philosophies behind using these tools. Some other things that make me feel like Simple genuinely wants to avoid screwing over customers: - Excellent same-day customer support (I have something like 20 conversations open at the moment); - No overdraft problems, because Simple will just reject transactions if you do not have the money for them (this even applies if you use your card as a credit card transaction--if you want to be strict, you can also make it reject transactions that would drain your Safe-to-spend but I don't do this); - Planning tools that encourage planning large purchases before you make them. (Example: I allocate 10% of my paycheck to a "Tithe" goal, for personal reasons. After doing this, I realize that was able to help a family member during a time of emergency without having to stress about making next month's rent since I already had this money set aside for this purpose.) Some problems that make Simple less attractive for serious people: - Low interest. I earned something like a buck of interest all last year. If you're serious about passive income, Simple might not be a good choice for you. (I'm a student. Maybe some day, but I don't want to be a miser quite yet) - I do not have check-writing privileges. If I want to send money to someone, I have to log into their website and fill out a form. Then, an elf in the "Simple Factory" in Portland or whatever will physically print off a check, hand-seal it into a plain white envelope, and put it in the mail to the address I indicated. - You can only put one name on the account, so if you're married, you and your spouse can't share your finances. (If you're both simple customers, you can send money back and forth though, which isn't so bad) But frankly, I don't mind these things. Their pitch is "We make banking not painful again," and their tools and customer service far outweigh these drawbacks. As a spending account, Simple will only be significantly helpful to you if you jump in completely and use everything they offer, making Simple your primary spending account. This is a hard pill to swallow for many people since they're already established as roughly-happy customers of other banks. I definitely would recommend Simple to someone who's just starting out in the "real world" who wants to learn how money works and get familiar with budgeting. (Sorry if this sounded like an advertisement. Maybe it is, in a way.)