Checking account with categories built in?

November 14, 2015 6:25 PM

I am instructed by my lawyer to change banks immediately. I remember seeing an ad, which I cannot place in time, for a bank which would let you build categories (kind of like budget lines) into your checking account. You could allocate X for household supplies, for instance. I have scoured these webs and cannot find such a thing. Does it still exist? What bank had it?
posted by The Noble Goofy Elk to Work & Money (11 answers total)

I think this is pretty common in one form or another. Key and PNC both have versions of this functionality. They might all call it different things, though.
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 6:26 PM on November 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

Best answer: The one that was hot for a while was Simple. No idea if it's any good, though. I'm guessing that's the one you heard of.
posted by selfnoise at 6:31 PM on November 14, 2015 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Well their little video made me cry, but after all it's that level of scrutiny that got me into this mess. I'll do some sleuthing though, that does look like the kind of thing I remember.
posted by The Noble Goofy Elk at 6:41 PM on November 14, 2015

PNC's Virtual Wallet account has a feature where you can place money from your checking account into a Reserve pot (it's not a separate account, it's sort of a partially walled off part of your checking) and you can divide the money that you stick in there up any way you want, call the categories anything you want, etc....
posted by soren_lorensen at 7:00 PM on November 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

I have PNC's virtual wallet; reserve is definitely a separate account. Other than that it doesn't really do what you're talking about. Instead, I use YNAB, which is the king in the "virtual envelopes" arena.
posted by supercres at 7:14 PM on November 14, 2015 [4 favorites]

Or maybe I just haven't looked hard enough? I think the last I looked they mostly just had goal setting and easy transfers to saving. Not sure.
posted by supercres at 7:15 PM on November 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

Pick an account with low fees, access to no-fee ATMs, and no overdraft fees. CapitolOne360 and Ally are both good choices. Get budgeting help for the rest, like Mint.com.
posted by yarly at 7:55 PM on November 14, 2015 [2 favorites]

I'm not sure this is quite what you're looking for, but Mission Federal Credit Union has been pretty awesome for us over the years, and it has a built-in budgeting feature. I don't use use it, but I'm happy to cut and paste info/instructions for you if you want to know more.

It says you can set up multiple budgets and assign multiple bank accounts to them. Looks like you can set a target amount and it tracks in a similar way to Mint.com. It doesn't allocate in an envelope-type way (for which I would of course recommend YNAB, because that's what we do here in AskMe).
posted by moira at 11:01 PM on November 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

Stopping in again to say: I couldn't find detailed info online, but this video shows a general overview of their online banking with a mention of the budgeting feature.
posted by moira at 11:29 PM on November 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

ALSO you can apparently set up one or more savings goals for a savings account and allocate funds to them.
posted by moira at 11:37 PM on November 14, 2015 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thanks so much everyone! I'm going with Simple.
posted by The Noble Goofy Elk at 8:36 PM on November 17, 2015