I like your concept of the multiple credit/card style budgeting. That makes a lot of sense. There are even some of those multicards out there with an e-ink display to select different cards. A bank could just issue one of those for a fee where you can select the account (and have a way to transfer money/items around if you select the wrong budget option).

Discover card has a section in your UI that tries to automatically break down your spending by store type (grocery, gas, etc.) but it does require you make all purchases with your Discover card, which a lot of people simply don't take.

So, I'm giving it to you now. This is just smart and logical. You do not need technical proficiency to reason out the risks, or the daily "12yo exploits MOST-SECURIST-EVER IOT device in 20 minutes" articles.

With that said, without public support, and government laws, this is a losing battle.

Equifax had no authorization from you to collect and distribute your financial data, but they did it anyway, and your financial services sent them the information. And of course, not surprised, their criminal negligence, revealed EVERY SINGLE ACCOUNT to hackers. Let's be real, when the news for stupids spins the story in this manner:

Equifax data breach: The number of victims may be impossible to know

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2017/09/17/equifax-data...

It means that the number was so great as to be unspinnable, so they went with another narrative, "Nobody knows" like dark matter, it's impossible, our scientists are trying but it's impossible....lol

Just assume all of them. Every last customer. Probably closest to the truth.

All merchants that accept credit cards are placed in a category by the card companies, and every credit or debit card purchase therefore gets this category attached to it. Some places surfaces this information to you, in various ways. I have Chase, and they have a pretty shitty UI for this, but there's something there at least.

So it's not unique to Discover, and it's not them "guessing" or trying, it's based on fixed merchant categories.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_category_code

Citibank includes this code in the "SID" element in OFX generated by their "OFX Direct" service (i.e. https://www.accountonline.com/cards/svc/CitiOfxManager.do). I haven't seen it in the OFX from any other financial institution though. The codes are cataloged here: https://github.com/greggles/mcc-codes

(though I'll admit the sibling's comment about satire is probably right)

1) http://www.simple.com

Moving physical addresses was a total shitshow. It involved them snail-mailing two verification codes. One to the current address and one to the new address. And you had to be able to collect them both and get them entered within a certain time frame. (Really inconvenient when moving from Texas to NYC).

And then got a new banking partner and had to basically re-enroll everyone again with a time component. There was a web form that crashed immediately when I entered my information because they couldn't verify my address. I filed a ticket immediately, which they didn't follow up on. When I followed up on it, they said it was a known issue and they were working on it. No worries, I'll get an extension.

Eventually after me calling several times to ask about it, they just said that there were issues with some of their oldest accounts that just couldn't be resolved. So I could Re-enroll from scratch on their website. Which I did. And immediately got flagged as fraud because I already existed as a customer.

Eventually, they told me I would just have to find a different bank, and they were closing my account in 7 days, and they were going to keep any money left in the account at that point.

I was pretty livid.

And the goal system was theoretically really cool. I liked it a lot. But it never really worked correctly because the goal tag wouldn't stick from the Auth to the Settlement. So anything you had flagged when you made a purchase you had to re-flag when the purchase was no longer pending. It was a great idea but somehow they never figured out quite how to relate the Auths to the Settlements in their user database. Which is pretty scary.

Anyway, long story short, up until a couple years ago, I would've completely agreed about Simple being a good option. But I can't warn people away fast enough after all of the garbage I've had with them.

Surprisingly I grinned and bared it until I decided the world wasn't ready for life without checks, unfortunately.

Your world. The US. There are plenty of countries where checks were phased out many decades ago. :-)

They just created a new goals system that "locks" off your money more than original goals. It seems like a good system, I need more experience to really say.

I still love Simple. But they made it readily apparent that I need to have funds in multiple banks to stay financially safe.

Is that even legal? If so it sounds like an extraordinary loophole.

Also if I come into a decent size amount of a cash payment, I can't walk into a bank to deposit it. Mailing in straight up cash seems super weird to me.

$1.95 per $1000 is pretty reasonable as far as fees go. If you want to deposit cash, you just get a money order for the amount, make it out to yourself, and use their photo check deposit. Funds available next business day.

If you need to pay someone, you buy a PMO with your debit card.

It's kind of an annoying requirement, but it beats the hell out of dealing with the banks in my area.

Just let them mail it... Simple!

Heck not even real "Accounts" (in the traditional banking sense) but just "funds" or "virtual accounts." I should be able to put $5/month into a "waste of money" fund, and then flag specific transactions against that balance when I use it, or as you said have a virtual credit card that goes straight out of my virtual "waste of money" fund.

It really is surprising how little innovation occurs in the banking space. I want more tools to track expenditures and money usage, silo-ing money virtually is an obvious way to do that, but yet nobody really offers it!

When I was a student, in 2001, Poland, I had such functionality - I had separate sub-accounts, each one of them with a dedicated IBAN number, receiving funds.

My monthly allowance from the parents went to one account, my payments from clients (freelance programming) went to another one. From that I distributed the money into another account for holiday savings, and to a spending account with a dedicated and free wire transfer of $5/day for daily spending - the only one I attached a debit card to.

Once I got a browser in my phone, I think around 2004, in case of emergency (as in "standing in line at the store, and discovered I'm $2 short"), I could transfer the money between various accounts instantly.

Another cool thing was that since my father had an account in the same bank, I received all the wire transfers from him instantly. As in, I call him, ask him for extra $100 for something, he says "hold on", opens up bank account on his browser, sends the money, and I instantly get a text message that the funds are received, and I can politely say "thanks dad, I got it" before disconnecting :)

Using past tense, because that was all in 2001-2004. 16-18 years ago. Right now I think all the major banks offer that, so nobody considers it a big deal any more. Oh, and now we have instant inter-bank transfers, but they cost "a lot" - like a flat fee €1, so people usually send the regular free ones, which take <1 work day to get delivered (<3h if you send them between 7am and 5pm) - regardless of which bank you are using.

I use a python script to download most transactions from banks/credit cards. https://sites.google.com/site/pocketsense/home/msmoneyfixp1/...

There are enough people who do this that you can figure out how to access the OFX endpoint for most financial institutions.

One problem I have with relying on OFX is that I have a nagging suspicion that it's not as 'official' as the statements. If there were a discrepancy between the two, I'd worry that I wouldn't be able to resolve it in my favor without having reviewed (and thus downloaded and reconciled against) the statements.

I really think the state of how bad consumer bank integration tech is has led to this reality of login and scrape that you have with yodlee & co.

Otherwise, it requires only an email (and that you pay them 5$/monthly somehow. Paypal, credit card, whatever).

If you don't want auto-import (which doesn't even work for my credit union anyway), you can uploads .csvs, or manually input your transactions.

LWN have a current "Grumpy Editor" series article on Beancount:

https://lwn.net/Articles/751874/

And an older one from 2009:

https://lwn.net/Articles/314577/

The correct answer is to close your account and move to a bank that actually has an interest in providing customer service. (Credit unions are great.)

I have zero interest in some company's CRM, how they apportion money to employees, or anything else of that sort. If a company cannot get meaningful feedback about customers' reaction to their service, well, that sounds like they have a serious business problem to solve, and expecting me to fix it for free is, frankly, insulting and doomed to failure[1].

My rule in life with this sort of thing is simple. Don't do business with assholes.

[1] Get back to me when WF's CEO's bonus depends on customers going out of their way to provide feedback.

As a consumer, I like my financial services to come in one of two flavors: Completely automated and self-service, or very personal.

Because I want to either never have to pick up the phone, or I want to know that, when I pick up the phone, ring straight through to a knowledgeable and empowered professional, instead of waiting on hold for 30m before getting some call center drone.

Any company where keeping a handle on customer service involves a signal having to filter through a CRM system and multiple layers of whatever-else-is-going-on-in-there is in neither of those camps: They aren't sufficiently automated and streamlined to give the hands-off experience, but they are also too bureaucratic to allow their customer-facing staff to offer a good hands-on experience.

And I just ain't got time for wallowing in some Goodhart's Law quagmire like that.

If I as a dev for a large company see people online complaining about my product, I'd _probably_ tell them, in good faith, that if I had no direct touch to help, what channels they MIGHT be able to touch to have an impact, even if it's only post-factum.

What would you rather the business do? Have 0 receptivity to any channel of communication? Yeah, ticketing and support often sucks. But I see no reason to bite the hand that's trying to help you, both when they're going out of their way to try and give information that might move the needle, and when I'm hard pressed to give any more actionable advice. (at least for parallels within my space.)

I certainly would have liked to know I had _any_ recompense after BoA left me high and dry on some last minute mortgage detail and my agent went AWOL right before signing, even if it wasn't going to necessarily help my situation.

I've had a number of devs, when receiving feedback, tell me that I should instead seek out their bug tracker, register with their feedback system, open a support ticket, give detailed instructions about how to identify and fix my problem, and then wait for a decision about how I'm wrong.

I've done that maybe twice.

IMO, the current best banking experience is Schwab. Hopefully they don’t make dumb changes and screw it up.

I’m tired of businesses trying to get me to do their jobs for them.

I use Monzo which, a few month ago added support for 'Pots' - super lightweight mini bank accounts that let you partition up your money. Among others, I have a Holiday pot and a Savings pot. They even have this early stage feature where if you name a pot "Coin Jar" they'll automatically round up transactions to the nearest £ and transfer it to that pot.

Using something like Monzo is like night and day compared to the products from the big banks.

Also, many people use it without auto-import, but then you obviously have to be rigorous about entering in transactions. Anyway, it's an option.

It also doesn't hurt that they have good interest rates, no foreign expense costs, and don't charge for things like debit cards, checks, autodraft, bill pay, etc.

I do think they are USA only though. Not sure how it works for non US citizens.

Or simply for death. Not my idea, I first thought it was a joke when they told me, but it makes perfect sense. I get exactly zero interest for my savings, not even to compensate inflation. It's stock options or bs funds.

Only useful service I get is cards and avoiding keeping cash in a physical safe. Credit comes from cards or specialized loan companies.

There are two services that do matter: mortgages and credit lines for companies. I can see how this kind of volume operations could be also be done by specialized companies so generalistic banks could disappear.

A few years ago a friend of mine bought a house and actually turned down a house who's sellers had a bank of America mortgage as he had bad experiences in the past. He went out of his way to choose not to deal with them, but to his suprise 30 days after he closed he got a letter in the mail telling him that his mortgage was sold to Bank of America!

And not suprisingly he had the same issues.

Is it actually possible to find someone who won't? Or is it just a false sense of choice like the ability to "choose an ISP that says they won't sell your information"?

As a buyer, why would I even care who the seller has their mortgage with? Why would that matter?

Where I'm from, the real estate agent deals with that shit. When you close the deal, the agent calls up the new bank or faxes them or whatever so that they open a mortgage for X amount for the piece of property for the buyer, and directs them to send Y to the old bank so that they close out the previous mortgage, and Z to the agent's account, who then takes their cut, and forwards the remainder to the seller.

Is this not how it works in the US?

Jesus.

Real estate agents have to be licensed, and part of their duties is of course to verify that the seller is who they say they are and that they own the thing they're trying to sell. When I sold an apartment, I had to show my ID to my agent so he could verify me.

The registry of who owns what pieces of land is managed by a government office, and government data is by legal default public, so checking if a seller actually owns a piece of land is trivial. You don't need to chase down a distributed sealed deed history thing thing, it's basically a single national database at this point.

So it's really simple to do, and the responsibility is on the seller's agent, who in turn has a strong incentive to not screw up, or they lose their license and their job.

When you go to your lender for a pre-approval on a mortgage, they want to know which piece of property you're buying, and they typically check that it's being sold by a licensed real estate agent, because if it is, then they can be assured that the seller is verified and actually can sell the property.

When you sign the purchase contract - which is typically one or two pages long - you sign one copy for the seller, one for the buyer, one for the agent, and one for the government office, and the agent helps you fill out the (short) form that goes with it so you can send it in and get the ownership legally transferred to you. That's it.

There's so little work involved with verifying ownership and transferring ownership, that it's just put on the shoulders of the real estate agents. The idea that you would need yet another party to handle this aspect is completely ludicrous in Sweden, it makes no sense.

So why was Klathmon's friend bothered by it?

Sadly, this is not how banks become rich. Banks become rich by letting their customers spend a lot of money they don't have, then charging them insane interest rates that will often result in them paying back multiple times what they originally owed.

Having moved to the US from a country where the idea of a credit card is close to inexistent (people take loans to buy a car or a house, or start a business - but certainly not to buy a TV), it took me a while to fully wrap my head around how insane the credit system was in the US, and how its only outcome can be very rich and powerful financial institutions leeching money from average citizens.

My friend is a recent employee of Capital One via the Paribus acquisition, and he has quoted his CTO as saying "We're not a bank, we're a technology company."

I don't bank with them so I can't comment on their offerings, but his insider perspective indicates that they're taking technology seriously (hence acquisitions like Paribus).

> I should be able to partition my money into several lightweight accounts - one for groceries, one for home expenses, investment, etc

You can open multiple checking accounts at most banks. I've made partitioned checking accounts like this before.

> automatically have fractions of my deposits sent to those accounts so my budgeting and money management are handled without any effort on my part.

Money transfers can be scheduled but they're usually by set amounts instead of fractions (e.g. add $100 on the first of the month). I use this myself.

> I should have lightweight cards available for each of those accounts with online card management (request/terminate cards, track per-card spending)

Should be able to open debit cards for each account but you'll probably need to be in person to request/terminate them. Maybe you could do it over the phone by authenticating yourself, not sure. I haven't heard of per-card tracking but at least you know what you spent on your card.

> multiple cards per account so I can give my wife full use of "grocery" card

You can tie multiple debit cards to the same account for a husband and wife. Try explaining what you're doing and a banker should set that up for you.

> alerts/notifications when I am spending too much in an account/not efficiently allocating the full amount/potentially using a card improperly

There are account alerts that can be set up for exactly this. I have it shoot me an email with the alert message when something gets triggered.

> financial projections

Account history can be downloaded in common formats like csv. There are already tools you could use to create the projection and do fancy data visualization things for yourself. You could scrape your account data periodically using your online banking credentials. Might be dangerous to automate though.

This part probably can reasonably be handled with a spreadsheet at home, so if you can't find a bank that supports it you can still get the benefits. Plus, that handles money that is not at your bank, too. For instance, many people prefer to use specialized firms for investments rather than their bank. For example, an index fund from Vanguard probably has lower fees than a fund using the same index from a bank.

> I should have lightweight cards available for each of those accounts with online card management (request/terminate cards, track per-card spending); multiple cards per account so I can give my wife full use of "grocery" card, and alerts/notifications when I am spending too much in an account/not efficiently allocating the full amount/potentially using a card improperly; financial projections; and so on.

I can't think of a good way to handle this at home without bank support, at least automatically. You might be able to do something using prepaid reloadable debit cards. E.g., you give your wife a prepaid reloadable debit card specifically for groceries, and you handle loading it from the grocery virtual account.

Edit: I just looked, and they indeed state that they may have close your account if you are traveling for "a very long time" or moving out of the country... odd, I wonder what their definition of "a very long time" is?

You can open multiple checking accounts (and we have multiples for those services that don’t draft from savings accounts), but we only have one debit card. All weekly expenses come from that account (which is funded every week by auto transfers).

We aren’t the type that care about “entertainment” vs “food.” Some weeks we eat out more; other weeks we play. If there’s cash in the spend account, buy what you want.

Savings and investments are automatically transferred as well. When we have a specific thing to save for, we open a new savings account and modify the transfer rules.

Not perfect, but works very well for us.

Then you can get a debit card for each of account and you can set your paycheck to deposited into each account with your company's payroll. Automatic transfers would work too. I do some budgeting per checking account, the joint account is for household bills. Savings is automatically deposited into my investments account too - did that with payroll.

Problem is some banks want fees per account or want you to jump through hoops to get the fees waived, but it's possible to get a no fee per account bank.

Youd be MUCH better off doing this with separate credit cards rather than separate bank accounts though for many reasons. Credit cards are big on account alerts - not sure if bank accounts really do account alerts, haven't looked into it. Just get a "grocery" credit card and a "fun" credit card, "bills" credit card etc. I, personally, have seventeen (17) credit cards.

I have a few other checking accounts with different banks, most of which are opened only temporarily, I churn bank account bonuses.

Unfortunately, getting data from bank accounts is a pain due to bank security. The approach I was going to use just to get started was to export Mint's data as a csv, and then build an app around that until I read up on the bank transaction formats that would let you pull your transaction history. Not ideal, though.

Edit: plaid is a nice abstraction bank api: https://plaid.com/

Once you want to add more than 100 accounts, we recommend reaching out to learn more about pricing at scale; it depends on what APIs are being used, how much data is being pulled, how often, etc. Feel free to shoot me an email directly if you have any questions! ([email protected])

I'm glad to hear that's not the case anymore.

Very opaque and very expensive ($500 / mo+)

Also, they will shut down your account if you don't use your free edition enough.

We'll occasionally flag accounts that have dormant API activity in our development tier, but as long as you're still using the API we're happy to cover the cost of the free account.

This is what I do. Mint doesn't have an API, but I just inject some javascript using the console that pulls the csv file and displays the data in a way that makes sense to me.

For sub-accounts, Capital One 360 is the easiest in terms of creating and removing accounts for specific purposes.

Most credit unions have this ability as well. I have accounts in two, and they use the same software platform that makes it easy to partition money in the way you describe. The only difference is that opening and closing sub accounts has only recently been available from the web interface.

Basically, there is no good reason to ever use a commercial bank, unless you have millions of dollars sitting around or handle a lot of cash and the convenience of a BoA or Wells Fargo has value to you for that purpose. Commercial banks will always be more expensive and less responsive.

My bank starling almost has this feature. It allows you to create "pots" which partition the money. However it is slightly more limited in that you only have one card and can only spend money that is not in a pot. You can however move money between pots instantly using the app (as well as many other useful features such as viewing/changing your PIN, and temporarily blocking/unblocking the card (useful if you lose it, but think you might find it again))

I agree it's a sector ripe for rebirth - it's an interesting time to be alive - we're living through a revolution comparable in scope to the industrial revolution, and industries like banking, which are primarily about storing and moving information, will be radically altered. Banking is one of the last to be touched.

https://ynab.com/referral/?ref=RhsyymvEwUvLaJTk (If you sign up with this link then we both get a free month.)

I do this today with my regular bank account that's with a big bank. I can open subaccounts, get cards for them (or student cards for young family members), have automatic transfers setup for the day after my check deposits, etc. All accounts are listed on my account summary page.

This works fine for me. As a bonus, there aren't any extra fees for the privilege of giving my bank credentials to a third party.

What I would personally like is an extension to the EFTPOS standard so that I can get receipts with my transaction history. It would be great if instead of just saying I spend $50 at the supermarket, it gave me itemised receipts which I could then export.

This is available in the United States, too. I've had the option with a couple of different employers over the years, at least back into the 90's. But it seems to be dependent on the the company's accounting/payroll people/service.

I have multiple "full" accounts, but there's no maintenence fees or anything. Their online tools are great. You can open a new checking account with the click of a button.

Although there are a handful of branches where I live, I never physically go there. I handle all check deposits via their mobile app. I never receive cash for anything though. You are correct, it would probably be a bad choice for someone dealing with a lot of cash.

And as a sibling comment said, no ATM fees anywhere in the world, ever.

I'm eagerly looking forward to Silicon Valley disrupters getting into banking and, somehow, making it even worse.

I had an account with exactly this functionality ~18 years ago (sic!) in Poland already. All three bank accounts I have in Poland right now offer that - and I think it's the standard in the mainstream ones.

We need a complete overhaul of our society, starting with the banks.