I have one checking account that my paycheck goes into, and I pay monthly/yearly recurring bills out of this account. There is nothing online for this account, the only way money gets out is that I get my bank to send somebody a check.

I set up a weekly auto-transfer to a separate account which my wife and I carry around debit cards for. This is for groceries, gas, and personal shopping stuff, including online.

a) My wife isn't into tech as much as I am and has a much lower threshold for acceptable complexity

b) More importantly, any software that I found had a large maintenance burden. Having her ask "do we have enough to go to dinner tonight?" requires me to have the books up-to-date almost on a daily basis. Too much work.

Now, the question of how much do we have to spend for specific activities has a very simple answer: how much is in the "spending" bank account, and it's easy to prorate that over a week's time.

A previous attempt at this was over a month's time frame, but that's too long of a time span. It's easy to overspend earlier in the month and fail to mentally take into account bigger things near the end of the month.

I also tried being "squishy" with the amount, moving it around depending on how much we overspent for the previous week (e.g., put something on our credit card because we actually needed to). This also doesn't work out too well, because it impairs predictability, even if it balances the books better. Plus, I want to get us off the mindset of using the credit card when we overspend a week. I was, frankly, being a tightwad with the weekly amounts and loosened it up a little to give us a bit more buffer.

Setting a weekly fixed amount made our money conversations easier. I'm still undoing financial damage from earlier (paying off credit card debt and building up savings for yearly bills), but this is an abstraction my wife doesn't need to worry about (she knows about it but doesn't need to deal with it).

This was all tangential to protecting yourself from badness, but it was a nice side effect.

It's two checking accounts in the same bank. Just call your bank and ask them to make you another account.

With my bank I don't even have to call them, I can make one from the account page.

By having it in the same bank I can leave the PayPal account always at 0, and transfer the money easily to the other account.

Banks are not always as smart as they should be and sometimes allow an account of a customer 'in good standing' or with a credit balance on another account to be overdrawn. Especially when it is done via direct debit.

This sort of thing can really bite you.

In every case Chase refunded me in full within a few days. This isn't something every bank does?

It might take you some time to get it back, but the bank is legally required to get it back to you.

For business accounts this protection does not apply.