They don't have a 'joint account' option but claim you can share a pocket with someone else and it works the same.
Except when you have an instrument that you need to deposit/credit and it's made out to two people. They won't credit it to the 'shared' pocket because technically that pocket is owned by you, not both.
Tried to work with them for a solution but all they could offer was that I could deposit/receive it at another bank and then transfer it. When I closed the account they warned me that once closed I could never come back(they don't allow you to become a customer again in the future if you close your relationship with them). Another odd rule. And no auto transfers and no ability to deposit a paper check(at the time)
The benefit wasn't worth the hassle and I moved on.
Since they bought Simple I'm hoping the features will trickle to their customers.
What they have now is close enough for now. Similar but there are 3 "pockets" -- two checking and one savings. And they have auto transfer. (One has auto transfer now also)
Bills/utilities/relatively fixed costs come from one pocket, dining/entertainment/variable costs from the other.
Excess is moved manually every couple months to savings.
Looking at One Finance and HMBradley, these 3% APY accounts seem to only be added to as a percentage of your direct deposit paycheck. For HMBradley, that rate only seems to kick in if you save 20% or more of your paycheck each month. I am not a financial advisor, but this seems way more than anyone should be keeping in cash. Main reason being you should only keep it for liquidity and emergencies and nothing else, because otherwise you're basically losing money to inflation.
The median American household makes $60k and has a net worth of $120k. The standard financial advice is to have an emergency fund to cover about 6 months of expenses, which we can say conservatively (adding in any other cash people keep) would be maybe $30k. To stay at that level with about 1/4 net worth in cash, you should save 25% in cash after expenses. The most common budgeting rule is 50% (needs)/30% (wants)/20 %(savings), meaning that to stay "even" you'd actually want to save at most 4% of your paycheck in cash (this way, 25% of your net worth growth will be in cash). This is not even enough for the lowest HMBradley tier of 0.50% APY.
I think all the assumptions I made are pretty conservative, namely that expenses grow linearly with income. I'm going to guess that if you're higher income (eg 2x median) your expenses will not be (they will maybe be up to 50% higher), so you should save even less to keep your emergency fund. Therefore 25% of net worth in cash seems to be a pretty good rule of thumb, if even too high for higher net worth households. You don't bump into that unless your total spending is 20% of your paycheck each month (the number of people like that must be really small). So one way or another, you're losing pretty significantly keeping that much in cash.
Edit: With the way I only send a small % of my paycheck to HMB, I don’t have to care about saving X% since according to their calculations I’m always saving 100% of my “paycheck”. The rest of my paycheck goes to One Financial where I use it as-needed without worrying about disqualifying myself from a higher saving tier.
Full disclosure: using my code would give me 1 “undo” or something like that. Essentially it would let me move up a tier 1 time if I were to fall for some reason. I don’t think I have any use for something like that but I always fell a little scummy offering referral codes so I didn’t want to leave it out.
If you want it, my email is in my profile.
Kind of unconvinced about YNAB, I want something that does more "autopilot with corrections", but YNAB seems to be "everything manual so you know where your money is going".
Like the cash envelope method of budgeting, they also allow you to select which pocket the current transaction will come from, so you can use specific pockets for different categories e.g. a pocket for groceries/food. The system would be more useful if transactions could be categorized automatically like Simple allowed you to do with goals/expenses. However, I found Simple's categorization to not always be accurate. I ended up categorizing a lot of transactions on my own.
It's also pretty cool that each of the pockets also has separate account numbers and virtual debit numbers (if necessary). I linked each of my credit card accounts to separate pockets independently.
Btw, I withdrew all my money from my account out of anger as soon as BBVA announced the transition haha. The whole thing was very confusing to me. Simple's product is far superior to anything of BBVA's or PNC's. Both companies should have been transitioning in the opposite direction to Simple's product and system. This whole process started after BBVA announced that their US operations would be acquired by PNC. It's pretty stupid too. No one I know decided to stick with their account. They definitely lost a lot of customers.
PNC's Virtual Wallet was on my radar years ago as an alternative to Simple, but I never gave it a try. When the PNC purchase was announced, I thought for a bit about just letting it roll over and trying Virtual Wallet. But then I looked into the fees section and found their overdraft fees are both fairly high per instance, and capped fairly high per day. IIRC, you could run up $140 of fees a day. Not a huge concern of mine specifically, but I don't want to support a bank that's sucking off the overdraft fees teat.
I ended up setting up a spreadsheet of my fixed expenses per paycheck, and then just set up One scheduled transfers of the amount that spreadsheet tells me to. That works at least as well for me as the Simple Expenses (which had a lot of annoying warts).
It doesn't really have an idea of when expenses are due (though you can set up dates on goals, but multiple tutorials I watched recommended putting the due date in the name, so you can manually sort the items. It also doesn't have an idea of when you get paid. So it can't do things like: "You're going to need to pay your mortgage of $X in 2 pay periods, so let's allocate $X/2 of this paycheck to the mortgage expense.
In fact, it doesn't support even "add the remaining amount for this expense", so you're going around typing the dollar values of different expenses.
I understand that this is part of their design to get people more familiar with their money and where it's going. Maybe if I was waaaay off track, and really pressed for money, that would be valuable. But I'm 90% on track, my worries are kind of higher level.
Again, maybe I'm misunderstanding something. But I've watched hours worth of tutorials, by YNAB and others, so I've at least done some level of research. :-)
E.g. When I get paid, that gets loaded into YNAB using a bank-import. So even if the rules don't run, I just have to go through all my "transactions" that got loaded from the bank import and just assign to pre-defined "payees". Further, each payee has a linked category so I don't have to categorize what expense that transaction was for, because it's implied by who the payee is. E.g. A butchery store payee means the category is e.g. "Groceries - Food - Meat" or just "Monthly Groceries". YNAB also has a filter where it highlights all transactions that haven't been assigned.
With the above stuff, there is no need to do any manual or scheduled expenses. The only time that doesn't apply is when you withdraw cash and spend it that way. If you do a lot of cash transactions, you'd have to do that manually unfortunately. But for myself, what little I spend using cash I just zero-out my "cash" account every once in a while with a manual transaction that is an "unknown expenses" budget category.
Some of the stuff above is specific to the YNAB 4 desktop software - before they converted to a subscription web-based tool.
You are correct that it doesn't have a concept of when you get paid or when your expenses are due, though I set up recurring transactions for everything, even things like utilities that fluctuate. I just go in on the first of the month and adjust the pending transaction to be the correct amount for my electric/water/sewage and save it. The whole idea of not telling YNAB how much I make a month was very confusing to me at the start coming from tools like Mint but there is a method to the "madness". For YNAB you never count on future earnings, all you can spend is what you have at this point in time. For the first month or two you might not finish funding the current month until part way through it but the goal is to get 1+ months ahead on all your spending so that you are always spending last month's money instead of living paycheck to paycheck.
Here is the video that helped me the most when I first got started, maybe it will help you as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPVEB759gkU
I tried YNAB4 (app-based) and nYNAB (web-based) both once before the most recent time I tried YNAB (starting May 2020) and this last time was the only time it "clicked" for me (and the first time I really got serious about my finances). YNAB has been literally life changing for me. I went from living with a very small buffer (despite my well-paying job) to having 3 months in the future fully funded. The peace I mind I get from knowing I could lose my job tomorrow and be fine for 3 months minimum (I'd probably cut some categories and/or plunder some savings-based categories to stretch it longer) is amazing. My bank account has never had this much money in it in my life and despite having to take a 20% pay cut for about 6 months, due to the pandemic, I stayed on track for everything and continued to grow my net worth.
I know I probably sound a bit like a fanatic or a "true believer" but YNAB (once it clicked for me) changed how I interact with money and my finances as a whole. I really hope it works for you or you find a tool that clicks for you if it's not YNAB!
I'm happy to answer any other questions you might have on it. I'm forever grateful to the friend who nudged me to try YNAB again and I feel obligated to "pay it forward" whenever I can to help other people get started on it.
Here is a short video: https://www.dropbox.com/s/dtps42rl2jmm7lw/Screen%20Recording...