Trying to save but accused of being a terrorist /fraudster :-(

innovate

Hominu wrote: »

Let me get this straight:

You buy groceries on your debit card and then login to online banking and move the funds from your grocery account when you get home.
.

I don't even get this. How can they pay on their debit card and then, when they get home, transfer money from their grocery account? You obviously need money in your current account so the debit card transaction goes through. So you would need to move your money before you go shopping. Or have a lump of money sitting in your current account, un-allocated to any particular spend (since the allocation happens in pot accounts, as we are given to understand).

Unless, of course, they use overdrafts, which would be hilarious, or sad, depending on how you see it.

Obviously it needs a very special mindset to understand the pots scheme.

vman

Hominu wrote: »

To me, the first requires more work and has more reliance on other things such as your internet access working, your online banking functioning, and the bank not screwing up your banking (as Natwest did on Monday due to a 'glitch')

There you go with that internet down argument again! Seriously, do you live in a caravan hanging off the edge of a cliff in the Orkney Islands? If this argument was carried forward to the real world nobody would buy kindles because there's a chance they would never be able to read a book again! It just isn't a sensible rebuttal of this alternative way of working.

If the banks were always having glitches it wouldn't be headlines news, and besides the glitch on Monday would have equally affected your spreadsheet system as the payment card network which was at fault (and quite frankly, if there is a glitch, who cares? Just try again tomorrow).

vman

innovate wrote: »

I don't even get this. How can they pay on their debit card and then, when they get home, transfer money from their grocery account? You obviously need money in your current account so the debit card transaction goes through. So you would need to move your money before you go shopping. Or have a lump of money sitting in your current account, un-allocated to any particular spend (since the allocation happens in pot accounts, as we are given to understand).

But surely if you are using a single account with manually spreadsheet (or tally book or whatever) as suggested then you will have that money sitting in your current account anyway? You should always have a bit of a float in your current account regardless.

vman

Seen_the_light wrote: »

Thanks vman, feeling slightly more vindicated by my electronic 'piggy banking' approach - never really felt the need to defend my approach until people started to bully others about it!

If anyone else is interested in how I make this work for me here goes
I use Nationwide
Wages get paid into flex account
Direct Debits go out in the first couple of days after wages come in
Once all these have gone out I transfer all the small amounts into various e-accounts (named by me online i.e. Birthdays, Holiday, Credit_Card) and the remainder into an e-holding pot, leaving a small balance in my flex account.
I then spend on either my credit card (which earns me cashback) or from my flex account.
At a convenient time for me (usually the same day) I re-top my flex account from a relevant pot (or just from the holding pot depending on what the expenditure is) or
If I have used my credit card I transfer whatever I have spent on the card to the Credit_Card e-account meaning that this account always mimics the money I have spent on my credit card and is there earning interest until it is time to pay the credit card bill - which because it is a Nationwide Credit Card, I see see all the details of on line and pay easily by internal transfer.
Any spare in my holding e-account at the end of the month I transfer into my ISA.
Few observations from other comments
I don't believe this system takes me any longer than it would to log on to a spread sheet
I never have to reconcile a spreadsheet against bank accounts
I usually have money for things I need / want or regular expenses in readiness and don't often get caught out (when I do I learn from it and I just set up another e-account ready for the following year)
I don't need to remember multiple PIN numbers etc
I only go into a branch to pay cheques / money in (i.e. Rarely) so don't cause a queue
This system changed me from an out of control spend-aholic into a bit of a canny saver! And whilst it might seem basic and simplistic to some, it works for me (and clearly some others).

I must say, going off this thread, the banking-buckets gang do generally seem to be of a more happy and personable disposition! The spreadsheet brigade (Luddites!) seem an incredibly defensive bunch. :cool:

I work in a similar fashion but typically reserve my buckets for annual spend items such as road tax, car insurance, etc. I kind of fell into this way of working accidently but find it works really well for me. Back when car insurance companies all started to charge a lot more for monthly payments (and my car insurance was a lot higher) I said “I’m not falling for that again”, had a spare ING savings so decided to pay monthly into that ready for next year. I noticed ING allowed you to create up to ten accounts yourself with a couple of clicks of a button so soon started using it for all other annual big ticket bills and have also created a Christmas bucket and birthday bucket as well. Birthdays were a particular pain as, like most families, they tend to group in one part of the calendar. In our family it’s November. If, for example the average birthday spend is £50 per person, you have 18 birthdays a year with 8 being in November, finding a £400 just before Christmas was awkward. Putting £75/month into a separate bucket every month is a lot more palatable (not indicative figures by the way, don’t question my generosity or lack of please!).

The good thing is all these payments into the buckets go out on pay day so I know that whatever is left in my current account is my left over ‘scratch’ money for the month. I could leave all these separate commitments in my current account and run a separate spreadsheet in parallel but the current account balance becomes pretty meaningless, you can’t walk up to a cash machine and get your balance and know how much you have to spend as there will always be several un-actioned commitments in that figure. Also, I do get a little interest on the buckets, albeit only a pound or two.

leskerr

Uxb wrote: »

The 'marginal cost' to a bank of an extra account is indeed small - but the overhead cost of having the infrastructure to support the ability to service these accounts including the online presence is huge.

So if you are running a business and someone comes along and wants something which requires you to load up some special gizmo into the whatsit and press a few buttons - do you charge for 5 minutes of your time: No, you will go bust very rapidly.
You are charging for the cost of buying/maintaining/upgrading the special gizmo in the first place plus your knowledge in making it all work.

The cost of developing and maintaining the gizmo in is the significant cost, any scaling impacts are an insignificant cost. The number of times you use that gizmo does not increase the cost.
The infrastructure impact is nowhere near significant. For a typical customer, the storage space for the static account info is tiny compared to the rest of the info stored for the customer.

Les

TurnUpForTheBooks_2

I think most of us can learn something from the OP !

I am not suggesting we all set up 18 accounts, but I wonder how many of us could name the 18 most important expenditure heads in our economies ? I bet the OP can do better than just name the 18 - I bet the OP can pretty much put them in order too !

Many of us will have been tempted to think the OP has some obsessive disorder, but the obsession is in fact one that used to be lauded - someone who is disciplined with their economy and knows how to save and what they are saving for, plus the OP is someone who perhaps understands their financial weaknesses better than most of us understand ours.

A couple of generations ago, this was something that most working families had to be good at.

How many of us run our economies like that anymore ? Very few of us. We take risks with credit instead. We are not counting the pennies and some of us in this thread have even suggested it is ridiculous to account expenditure to the penny. But is it ?

Is it not perhaps not more ridiculous for so many of us to be reliant on credit and just "winging it" from one payday to the next?

Banks don't now whether they are coming or going on this kind of thing. As has been said, one major bank years ago encouraged its clients to set up multiple "pots" (separate numbered accounts too).

In the noughties we have been through a "retail personal bank acccount selling frenzy" where sellers in bank branches have had little compunction in setting up multiple current accounts and savings accounts. In the case of savings accounts, the deliberate churning from one specially titled savings account or cash ISA for example to the next year's catchy titled version has been appalling.

One thing that I will however say is that the suggestion that any of our banks have the right to treat the OP this way, let alone NatWest, is wrong. Banks currently have no rights. They have lost them all. Well done banks. You have nothing to lose now except maybe one thing. Your banking licences are the only thing between you and oblivion.

Customers have rights, both written and unwritten, and their first right is to be respected by their bank, especially their main bank. Those posters who have chosen to argue justification for something different might need to ask themselves whether they are arguing for a Wild West, a mere corporate play-park, or for something closer to a civilised, caring and responsible society.

I suspect that most people contributing to this thread waste money. I suspect that they might argue strongly that it is their right to spend and manage it how they like since they "earned it". We can see that in many cases they are urging the OP to adopt their more learned or laid-back view of life. But are they right to do so ?

The corollary of the right to spend one's money how one likes might well be the right to earn it how one likes. One might assume that anyone arguing the latter is probably living more comfortably than the OP. The right to earn ones money how one likes might for example appeal to those who work for banks. I have met very few people who work for banks who wish they were not. They of course all wish they were earning more, but few want to work at anything else, even though those entering banking as a vocation are as diverse as any group you might take off the street.

Working for a bank however does mean that you constantly have to second guess what your bosses want from you and make sure you aren't noticeably out of line. So in this thread we do have quite some guesses about why the OP was treated the way they were treated, and very few out of line who have said how wrong it was for the OP to be dismissed so rudely.

Of course, realistically, the OP is out on a limb with 18 accounts, but enlightened folks can see how the OP arrived at the situation. My guess is that spreadsheets are not the answer for the OP but that one of the money management software programs may well be. Many years ago I found Quicken (for individual/household economies), and then Quickbooks (for small businesses) from a company then called Intuit gave exceptional and "intuitive" control to match any disciplined spender's needs. I forget who took them over but I think the products are still around.

I preferred them to Microsoft Money which was a fledgling twenty years ago but is probably just as good now?

Those types of programs do take a bit of initial setting up and tailoring (hours of time will be probably be needed by the OP to get it working just how they like). For the OP I think it would be time well spent.

I believe that these programs are designed to automatically update themselves by uploading standard online banking exports of account data.

The OP would however have to make a conscious decision to transition from 18 bank accounts to maybe just three or four including current account in order to make the bank account side of "keeping the books" going forward, the "simple" side. The money management software would then (once set up with personally tailored data import rules) "map" the bank account transactions automatically into the 18 pots.

Simultaneously it would automatically offer very valuable pie-charts and graphs which I am sure the OP would really enjoy as a massive extra bonus over and above what they can see when they view their existing system.

I really do empathise with the OP and congratulate them on having a system where, unlike most of us, personal budget information is at their fingertips and prudential money management is an important part of their life-style. These things are not to be sniffed at as some clearly do.

I wish the OP luck with transitioning to something less contentious now.

As I have said, I find this whole thread quite fascinating.

Hominu

vman wrote: »

There you go with that internet down argument again! Seriously, do you live in a caravan hanging off the edge of a cliff in the Orkney Islands? If this argument was carried forward to the real world nobody would buy kindles because there's a chance they would never be able to read a book again! It just isn't a sensible rebuttal of this alternative way of working.

You must have perfect internet then as mine is regularly down about 3 - 4 times per week, sometimes more depending on the weather.

If your happy relying on other companies doing what they should be doing then thats fine, but I'm just saying that the alternative is practically the same and has none of the reliance. If you can boot your PC to the desktop then you can access your pots.

The other advantage of having your funds in a current account and virtual pots is that you can easily get much better interest on those funds (upto 5%).

vman wrote: »

the current account balance becomes pretty meaningless, you can’t walk up to a cash machine and get your balance and know how much you have to spend as there will always be several un-actioned commitments in that figure.

You can get that even with your 'pots' if you pay with a debit card. You could spend £80 on shopping, move the £80 from your grocery fund, then forget about it a few days later, check your cash machine balance and spend that £80 before the retailer has taken it. The only way to avoid this is to know what you have already spent. Have I mentioned using a spreadsheet for this?

Hominu

TurnUpForTheBooks wrote: »

I am not suggesting we all set up 18 accounts, but I wonder how many of us could name the 18 most important expenditure heads in our economies ? I bet the OP can do better than just name the 18 - I bet the OP can pretty much put them in order too !

I don't know what you mean by "most important expenditure", but I think most people know what is most important for them.

I do have a full account history going back 10 years, showing every category that I have setup and what I've spent and received in each of those categories. I can even graph it in various formats for any date range. There's far more than 18 'pots', as I can see what I've spent on every bodies birthday, so if one of them says £0 in the last year, I know I need to buy them something.

There's really nothing quite like a graphical illustration of what you have spent your money on in the last month, quarter, or year.

TurnUpForTheBooks_2

Hominu wrote: »

I don't know what you mean by "most important expenditure", but I think most people know what is most important for them.

I believe you know, Hominu, but most people are not like you and the OP!

There's really nothing quite like a graphical illustration of what you have spent your money on in the last month, quarter, or year.

I fully agree (although clearly the OP's 18 accounts gives the OP a very good "picture"). I think you recommended spreadsheets but remember they are not for everyone. You might be surprised how few who have worked twenty years and describe their vocation as "bookkeeper" can actually devise spreadsheets to suit their own whims and needs! But you might well be one who could persuade the OP to try a money management software program.

Hooloovoo

vman wrote: »

There you go with that internet down argument again! Seriously, do you live in a caravan hanging off the edge of a cliff in the Orkney Islands?

It's not silly at all. My internet banking is down several times a year, often for several days at a time.

Through my job I travel abroad a lot. I spend maybe two months in total out of the country every year. All the time I'm travelling, I may not have access to the internet, or I may not be comfortable accessing my bank from the connection I do have.

To make it worse, during these periods of down time I'm usually making large purchases - flights, hotels, cash withdrawal for taxis etc. - that all need to be accurately tracked and accounted for so that I can put in the appropriate expense claim. And the budget needs to last at least two months, because it might be two months before I get any of this money back depending on when I file the claim.

If I didn't have an offline system to track all this (GNUCash on my laptop) I'd be in serious trouble.

Not to mention the fact that the "pots" system only really works for card expenditure. Once you have done a cash withdrawal, the money has left the banking system and unless you have some other offline method of tracking what you spend in cash the whole system breaks down.

Seriously, my financial life is so complicated, as it is for many people that travel on business. I have to cope with unexpected expenditure running into thousands of pounds a year and budget for that being missing until an expense claim is paid. It really makes me laugh how some people seem to struggle budgeting a couple of hundred quid for Christmas.