Sunday, February 26, 2006

Anyone else in the blogging world seen the improvements that PNC Bank made in their online banking section of their website? It looks nice! Yesterday it took me over an hour to enter all the details for the accounts with which I want to pay my bill through electronic check.

All this designing of the schematics of our banking 'system' has gotten me wondering. Is it really important to have a savings account for EACH item you want to save for? What about checking accounts? Should one just have a single checking account, and mentally keep expenses categorized? What about running a ledger alongside a checking account register? What I mean is divying out X percentage of income to 'fixed expenses' and Y percentage out to 'living expenses'. Or, has it been proven more effective to have separate checking accounts for various types of expenses?

Since we have pretty much separated ourselves from ING Direct (I hate that company, they don't make it difficult to access your money because they want to encourage you to 'save your money') and USAA (they're not reliable, I found a critical error the other day where they had taken someone else's checking account and linked it to mine), we're just about set on doing our finances this way:

Income:
---: 60% Expenses
---: 10% Spending Money
---: 20% Emergency Fund
---: 10% Planned Savings

Right now there is NO WAY we can drop below the 60% mark on our expenses. I'd say that even 60% is a bit uncomfortable. It's my fault, really. I went without income for so long, it's pathetic. My wife was off work for a little while (to separate herself from my lazy, unemployed butt), so that put us further behind. Still, it wasn't her fault. Anyway, we're in serious catch-up mode right now, and it's even more stressful with a baby on the way. The great challenge for me is to support us for 3 months (that is her dream, would allow her to spend a lot of time with the baby) on a 'factory salary'......or about $8-9 per hour. Riiiiggghhhhtttt. Oh well, it's all in good fun :)

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