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Simple Bank Is Closing

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Re: Simple Bank Is Closing

#281

Post by cactus2093 »

bichiliad wrote: post #172

A while ago, I had a landlord who withdrew rent directly from my bank account[1] and who kept charging me rent after I had left. They also refused to return the money to me and insisted I file an ACH dispute through my bank, Simple. I was responsible for rent for me and my roomate, so being double charged rent for a month meant I was suddenly short two peoples' worth of rent. Simple was super, super good about the wh…

> Always use a 3rd party or pay manually

Not sure what you mean by a 3rd party, but just a reminder that every check you spend contains all the info anybody needs to pull out arbitrary amounts of money from your account over ACH in the future. So if you've ever "payed manually" with a check, even if you've never set up automatic rent payments, your landlord could still do the same thing if they wanted to.

I find it infuriating that no financial regulators or banks have ever bothered to address this. Mailing a check is basically equivalent to sending your login information over plain http to a site that doesn't even hash passwords in their database. And the stakes are even higher than they are just about any online account you might have. But we're basically forced to do it all the time.

Re: Simple Bank Is Closing

#282

Post by texasbigdata »

silexia wrote: post #217
ssully wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used Simple since 2014 and it's easily the best banking experience I have ever had. I've spread my spending and banking activity out over different banks/services over the years, but I always use Simple as my main bank. Honestly not sure where I will move my main account over to.

So many valuable businesses have been destroyed by investors or founders seeking an early exit. If you are an entrepreneur, think very long and hard before you accept any outside money. I have seen so many good businesses forced to sell by investors or a founder who thought they were done, only to regret it later.

False choice. Some of those destroyed businesses would have never existed without that very same investor capital

Re: Simple Bank Is Closing

#283

Post by ska »

breckinloggins wrote: post #240
drewpc wrote: post #224

I'm a Simple customer and incredibly upset by this decision. For those not familiar with their value add, Simple is essentially "envelope budgeting" built into a banking application. Sure, it's a bank and does bank things. What sets Simple apart is that I can allocate $n/month for an expense and it takes it out of my paycheck and puts it into that expense "envelope". When a charge comes in for that expense, it pulls…

Agreed. I've been using envelope budgeting since college and I simply can't fathom why most people don't do it. Actually, I can fathom it: it's because no one has been willing to keep this incredible feature in an easy-to-use product and support that product long enough for people to see the value. In college I used gnucash for this and even wrote a (now very old and somewhat embarrassing) article about it ( https://…

I'm not so sure you want your bank to do this, because there is no easy aggregate view if you have multiple banks and/or other accounts to track. I have I think 6 currently with no way to merge (curse of bouncing between countries).

Gnucash is as baroque as you say, but the only one of your options above that actually works and solves this problem (aggregate view) reasonably, of course that can't help you with things like virtual CC limit above. Still, it's much nicer than doing double entry with spreadsheets.

Re: Simple Bank Is Closing

#285

Post by bluedevil2k »

kipple wrote: post #194
cweagans wrote: post #84

I don't know how many Simple employees are in this thread. I'm very sad to hear this news, and I'm sure you were too. Just want you to know that you all made a really meaningful difference in the lives of at least my wife and I. Before I switched to Simple, I had a really hard time budgeting for things/planning for expenses, and was frequently toeing the line of overdrawing my account. I was essentially financially i…

Depending on your mortgage interest rate, have you considered continuing the 18 years and investing your extra cash in index funds? Market returns ~10% over 20 years, so if your mortgage is 6% or less it's in your best 'interest' to continue.

This is good advice. A 30 year mortgage is like 2.8% right now, after taxes maybe 1.8%. The stock market over any 18 year time period (after taxes) will return higher than 1.8%. Adding to that, liquidity - having money in the bank provides flexibility, having equity in the house is nearly inflexible.

Re: Simple Bank Is Closing

#286

Post by texasbigdata »

immad wrote: post #280
tylermenezes wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a very ordinary LLC and Novo rejected my application for no obvious reason, with no details whatsoever. I don't think I have anything unusual going on, so IDK how easy they actually are to work with. Mercury is another option but my experience has been that some of their offerings are at best misleading (I would argue they're deceptive), and they can't do normal things like export a QBX statement to reconcile…

(I am the ceo of Mercury) We do have an export feature. Let me know what its missing (email in bio). Also, what did you think was misleading? We try to be fairly straightforward and transparent with everything we offer.

Does it export in all formats likes he’s claiming it doesn’t? Can you point to documentation? Usually, and not always, when someone makes a shadiness it’s directionally hinting at someone.

Re: Simple Bank Is Closing

#287

Post by MattGrommes »

duhi88 wrote: post #262
kritiko wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I pay for YNAB. For me it's worth it for their auto-import to take a quick look at my spending across accounts at various institutions and to look at larger trends over time. A lot of folks were annoyed when they went to a subscription model, but I think the visibility they provide really does pay for itself.

I tried it. Auto-import never worked reliably. I asked their customer support for help, and they said I should just do it manually. They seemed like a close alternative, but if I'm doing all this work manually, I might as well use a spread sheet for free.

They've done a bunch of updates to the importing in the last year so it might work better with your institution now. They support Oauth for the bank creds too for those that support it, which is great.

Re: Simple Bank Is Closing

#288

Post by texasbigdata »

blackaspen wrote: post #232
Shank wrote: post #156

BBVA is also closing Azlo, the business bank that Stripe Atlas uses (used?) for LLCs. Looks to me like BBVA is attempting to annoy as many customers as possible. I love Simple to death. They overnighted a cashier's cheque for me, for free, on holiday. They've been nothing but kind and I truly hate to see them go. I really really loved being a Simple customer.

As an Azlo customer, I'm super bummed. I think this is the weird case of BBVA closing their sort of B2B Banking business (underwriting?). What annoys me more is that whatever BBVA has to "replace" Azlo (or presumably Simple) will likely be worse in every way.

Probably some 24 year old McKinsey got staffed to do the merger integration on no sleep for days on end...this is what happens.

Re: Simple Bank Is Closing

#289

Post by gonehome »

skapadia wrote: post #233
drewpc wrote: post #224

I'm a Simple customer and incredibly upset by this decision. For those not familiar with their value add, Simple is essentially "envelope budgeting" built into a banking application. Sure, it's a bank and does bank things. What sets Simple apart is that I can allocate $n/month for an expense and it takes it out of my paycheck and puts it into that expense "envelope". When a charge comes in for that expense, it pulls…

I can't get myself to pay for services like YNAB or mvelopes.com I could see someone wanting to pay for a year or two until they've established the habit of disciplined saving. But to perpetually pay a service to present a (useful) facade over your money doesn't seem right if it's not also instilling habits in you that don't depend on software.

YNAB is excellent - its design forces people to budget properly.

It also lets you track all expenses and let’s you keep lifestyle inflation in check.

I’ve found it well worth it (and I’m pretty responsible financially).

Mint on the other hand is totally useless.

Re: Simple Bank Is Closing

#290

Post by drusepth »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #243
drusepth wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've thoroughly enjoyed using Capital One's online banking for pretty much this. I have ~20 different savings accounts that I use for budgeting envelopes (you can have up to 25, I think) and each has their own routing/account numbers so you can set up services to pull directly from them and I set up automation to put $X in them from a "main" income account every 2 weeks, so I don't have to manually move money from ac…

What are your “envelopes”/accounts and what do you actually do with them? For example if you have a groceries envelope. How does that change anything for you? Would you buy more or less food at some point? Would you rebalance it at the end of the year? Is there some calculation of I are too spent too much this week so we’re making food? I ask because I have a reasonable I does what I spend money on and it’s not reall…

Most of the accounts are for things that have a mostly-fixed price per month (e.g. utilities/insurance/investing that might cost more/less month-to-month, but average out to $X, which gets automatically put in them each month), or things that build up each month and get spent whenever (e.g. gifts/travel budgets that I put $X into each month, then pull from as-needed whenever it's someone's birthday or the $ is high enough to go on a trip). Plus a couple annually-withdrawn accounts for subscriptions (staggered for things that renew on different months, so I don't withdraw too many times in a single month), e.g. spotify, xbox live, notebook.ai, etc.

For the more fluid day-to-day stuff that I might make "withdrawals" from multiple times a month (like groceries and random spending), I usually stick to using checking accounts (which you only get 3 of on CO, unfortunately), but yeah, I have $X put in each month and look at how much is left to get a gauge on how much to spend or not (which does make me spend more/less on food/whatever at some points).

I rebalance every few months and look at whether I'm averaging more/less than I expect on each account and adjust the automatic deposits into each account accordingly, so it's mostly just a way to visualize a budget day-to-day while also making it easy to go back and see actual spending numbers month-to-month (which I also track with spreadsheets, but that's another conversation!).

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