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
We are effectively single income so I will ignore my wife's accounts.
I have:
Credit cards:
CU checking is where mortgage and bills are paid from. It is also where the money goes out of to pay credit cards down. Correspondingly CU checking gets the lion's share of direct deposit. HYSA gets a fraction, but I will top it off at the end of the month to get on target with our savings goal ($1000/mo towards HYSA as long as nothing is being spent). CU Savings are pretty much empty these days, APY is so low it is irrelevant. For whatever reason that's where the connection to Fidelity lives so I can contribute to the Roth IRA, but that is the only use anymore now that our cars are paid off.
I don't make enough to max my 401k so the brokerage is just used for when RSUs and ESPP shares deposit. Then I sell them, put some in retirement and transfer some to CU for cash.
Roth contribution is manual each month. Bill pays are manual (except for a couple on autopay on CCs, if they don't charge card fees). Mortgage is automatic from checking. I track the target emergency savings separately in a spreadsheet which also includes budget & other info.
What makes the Fidelity cash management account & its associated debit card so good?
The foreign transaction fee thing isn't particularly important to me since I use credit everywhere, but it may come in handy if my credit cards don't work for some reason.
So for me, I don't need to care which ATM I use, I just use whatever is most convenient. They do have an ATM network, but that just saves Fidelity some money.