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
Paycheck goes into checking at credit union, where I have a money market account alongside and a ton of auto transfers. Basically any incidental regular expense I’ve canceled (useless subscription, payment plan, cigarette habit) gets transferred at the rate it used to be. I’ve been doing this since middle school and it’s up to about $1k/mo.
Other than that, PayPal Cash Back card rewards funnel into a high interest PayPal Savings account. I also transfer whatever is over my emergency fund threshold from the money market account into here. When it gets big enough to roll into a higher yield CD, it goes back to the credit union.
Simple setup but it works. I keep retirement in its own separate world.
For me in the Netherlands. I have one bank account, salary comes in, all bills are paid automatically, some money gets automatically transferred into my savings account.
Pension gets taken out of my paycheck automatically as well, so not doing anything special for that. In the rare cases I use a credit card, it will automatically be paid off as well, so nothing really to worry about there either.I have recently bought my own place, so once savings are back to a safe level I’ll start to make a monthly investment in some index fund.
Thanks for starting the discussion! Here’s my setup:
- Wife and I have paychecks deposited into regular credit union checking account.
- From there a small portion goes into a separate high-yield savings account with CapitalOne (currently getting 5%). This is primarily our “just in case” liquidity account that we can pull from on a dime for any unforseen emergencies.
- Another portion then goes into a Fidelity brokerage account for non-advantaged personal investments (non-401k/roth since we max those out separately and those are fed directly from the paycheck)
- Recently I’ve also stated diverting another portion into Tbills, though I need a better system for this.
- The only thing that remains in checking is the amount needed to cover our monthly cc payments (everything goes through cc bc I’m a cashback/point slut, and it makes no sense not to take advantage of the additional protections imo) which get paid off monthly
Currently I do all the separate account transfers manually after the paychecks are deposited. Main reason is bc I grew up quite poor so I got very good at tracking every dollar manually and never broke the habit. And it serves as a mini-audit every two weeks which is a nice bonus.
Out of curiosity, how did you set up your Treasury bill efund account through Fidelity? I’ve been looking to consolidate and better track my tbill purchases but haven’t settled on a good solution yet
how did you set up your Treasury bill efund
Fidelity supports auto roll, so I set up a ladder by buying the same amount every few weeks with the same maturity. I wanted a three month efund of $13k, so I bought $2k 13-week t-bills every two weeks, and $1k on the thirteenth week. I started that earlier this year and the auto roll went through without a hitch.
I have the other half of my efund (the other 3 months) in Ibonds, but I’ll probably end up moving that to t-bills now that I bond rates are less interesting and I prefer having everything in one place anyway. So I’ll do that by buying 26 week t-bills and converting the 13-week t-bills as well.
It’s a little bit of a pain to set up, but once it’s going, it’s completely hands off. If you’re lazy, you can just buy a t-bill fund and get pretty much the same benefit, but I like owning the bills themselves for some reason. Since it’s a brokerage, you can do whatever you like.
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.
