CalorieCents

I’ve been sick the past four or five days plus I’ve been away on business. I’m gearing up for another business trip that will last through Friday. Hopefully, I’ll be able to mend on the road. If anyone has any suggestions for managing a cold while not at home, I’d love to hear from you. This also hasn’t done me any good in the weight loss department.  I’m a personal believer in waiting until you get better before putting additional physical stress on your body. I missed this week’s weigh in but I’ll get to it next week.

So my banking situation is a little complex though I’m ok with the setup for now. Here’s the breakdown. I’m a rate chaser when it comes to savings account and I’ve had online savings accounts at igobanking, fnbodirect, but now have settled on One United.  I know SingleMa had a  bad experience with them but I think they’ve worked out their kinks.  The rate at One United is 5.3% APY but they pay interest quarterly.  I’m crossing my fingers that the rate will stay the same after the next anticipated Fed rate cut.  Eventually, I’ll probably put my savings into a money market fund but that’s not happening any time soon.  The savings account is pretty straight forward.

The checking is where it gets complex.  Before I switched jobs, I opened an ingdirect account.  At the time, I think ING had a 4% APY for its online checking.  The only drawback with ING is that you need to keep a brick and mortar bank account for some convenience, especially for deposits.  My brick and mortar bank is Chase bank.  I can get frustrated with them because of their fee structure.  We have 3 accounts with Chase, one is a joint account, one is an individual account for me and one is an individual account for my wife.  We set up the individual accounts for our respective allowances.  This way we don’t ruin Christmas, birthdays or random surprises.  Normally I would close the joint account but we make all the joint deposits into it and its easier to keep things clean instead of commingling joint money in our allowances.

I’ve also recently opened up a rewards checking account at Toledo State Bank.  (You can read more about rewards checking accounts at the excellent Bank Deals blog.)  I can earn 5% APY on upto the first $70,000 if I meet the following requirements: 1) setup a direct deposit or ACH transfer into the account every month, 2) complete 10 Debit Card transactions (non-ATM) 3) receive electronic statements.  There is a local NJ bank that offers 6.01% rewards checking but I want to see if they will lower the rate after the next anticipated Fed Rate cut.  I haven’t yet received my checks from WalMart for this account so I haven’t moved my automatic payments and direct deposit yet but that should happen by next week.

Once the direct deposit has been set up. The ING will get a set amount and Toledo will get the rest.  The ING account will fund the joint Chase account at the first of the month and then we will transfer that amount into our individual accounts and then mid-month ING will fund the individual accounts.  I’d close the ING account except that Toledo doesn’t do online ACH transactions (since Chase will charge me a fee if those accounts don’t receive electronic funding every month).  I’d have to call Toledo and I’m not calling twice every month to do that.  The One United account is linked to all the accounts.  Did you follow all that?

Obviously, I’m not keeping this very simple.  I’ve thought about moving the brick and mortar accounts to Commerce Bank since I’ve heard a lot of great things about them but I have a feeling they’ll charge me fees if they are not automatically funded every month just like at Chase.  Anyone think I can do this easier?  Any solutions would be most welcome!