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Simple Bank Is Closing

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Re: Simple Bank Is Closing

#511

Post by hrktb »

cookiengineer wrote: post #496
mtzet wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What additional benifit does moving money around provide? From my perspective, there is not much difference between money moving around in the banking system vs moving around on your budget sheet, except the banking system might charge overdraft fees if the accounts are mismanaged. Based on that reasoning I've taken the approach to only have as many bank accounts as I need to utilize their services, and to interact w…

Counter-question: Does your operating system have all its files directly placed in "/"? Why not? Human nature of thinking needs a context, therefore it makes sense to provide folders or categories to get an architectural structure into a huge amount of data that needs to be processed. Additionally, if you need to manage a business account; having multiple accounts to balance the differences and to trace money expense…

That's a good point. We used to partition our disks and assign space budgets to specific partition/mounted directories.

It was to me a PITA, and juggling with partitions, redimensionning them because circumstances changed, moving files from one partition to another because it was getting saturated etc. were horrible.

Instead of having a tool handling that horror, thinking of disk space as a continuous resource and checking from time to time where that space go and if it needs cleaning is more manageable IMO.

I have the same mental model for money, and outside of very specific cases (mortgage accounts, kids account, professional expenses etc.) I don't think it's worth it partitioning at the account levels just for the sake of it.

Re: Simple Bank Is Closing

#512

Post by amaccuish »

njarboe wrote: post #416
asciimike wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's hyperbole. Having a bird's eye view of every single account, transaction, investments, net worth, etc. is "totally useless"? No. If you can get it to actually connect to things (I have 2FA on most accounts, and since Mint scrapes the sites and stores passwords in plaintext, it doesn't know how to handle this) and tag everything properly (MCC's vary pretty widely). I think that the promise of Mint is great, b…

I just don't understand giving your banking credentials to a third party. Will your bank even cover fraudulent withdraws if you give your login info to Mint?

My Sparkasse app (Germany) lets me add other bank accounts and the credentials are stored only in the app. I think there's an EU directive forcing banks to have an open API, which makes it work. Much better than screenscraping.

Is there any such trend in the US?

Re: Simple Bank Is Closing

#513

Post by SecurityLagoon »

mtzet wrote: post #490
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…

What additional benifit does moving money around provide? From my perspective, there is not much difference between money moving around in the banking system vs moving around on your budget sheet, except the banking system might charge overdraft fees if the accounts are mismanaged. Based on that reasoning I've taken the approach to only have as many bank accounts as I need to utilize their services, and to interact w…

The only advantage I can see is for people who don't monitor their expenditure well so their purchases get denied when they try to spend too much on a particular thing. Otherwise, I agree, there are plenty of services and other banks that allow you to categorize transactions so you know how much you are spending on particular things.

Re: Simple Bank Is Closing

#514

Post by SecurityLagoon »

madeofpalk wrote: post #346
baby wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two things: - Monzo and Revolut are better products - they discriminate against permanent residents who are not citizens (you can’t use their service) So from my point of view: heh

it’s not really helpful to provide UK banks as an alternative to a US bank

Revolut is in the US https://blog.revolut.com/revolut-launch-united-states/

Monzo is launching in the US but got held up by the pandemic. https://monzo.com/usa/

Re: Simple Bank Is Closing

#515

Post by fauigerzigerk »

zhte415 wrote: post #509
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Counter-question: Does your operating system have all its files directly placed in "/"? Why not? Because my files are not fungible. I understand keeping business transactions separate from personal transactions. But creating lots of little pots of money for different personal expenditures makes no sense to me at all.

It makes sense to me. I channel 100 per month for the winter heating bill, no need to think about that, it's automatically there. I channel 500 per month for petty cash, don't dive into the rest, it's automatically there. I channel 200 per month for annual insurances, no need to think about that, it's automatically there. Etc. It's a personal direct-debit, like using rules on one's email.

I know a lot of people like to do it that way, otherwise these features wouldn't support an entire new category of fintech startups. For me, this is a mental burden and too much busy work.

What's more useful to me is forecasting. If the app knows how much money I'm going to need (e.g for rent, bills, groceries, insurance, etc) and it knows how much I will probably receive by then, it can show me whether I'm on the right trajectory and how much headroom I have for discretionary spending. My Monzo app does that (somewhat imperfectly).

But if I decide to buy a new computer, I don't want to manually "borrow" money from three different pots and later replenish them manually. I just want to spend the money and have the app tell me the total amount I have to raise in order to stay solvent.

Re: Simple Bank Is Closing

#516

Post by rswail »

joppy wrote: post #377
bluedevil2k wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It could be because I’m Australian or perhaps I’m just unfamiliar with mortgages - how does tax affect the effective loan rate?

As an Australian that's dealt with the US bank/tax systems:

* Mortgages in the US traditionally are 30 year fixed rate.

* Mortgages are deductible from federal income tax up to a certain value

* People in the US have trouble understanding things that Australians are used to, like: variable rate mortgages, fixed/variable rate mortgages, redraw accounts, lines of credit mortgages, which all Aussie lenders offer.

On the other hand, as an Aussie I was confused by:

* People still writing cheques (checks). Like, really? On paper and stuff? Haven't written a cheque in Australia since 2000 and the only time I see it is the "CHQ" button on an EFTPOS.

* Contactless credit cards are only just a thing and people don't have PINs, they still stick their card in, or swipe (?!?) and sign.

* There's no such thing as EFTPOS which goes direct to your account, there are Visa/MC debit cards that work in the field like credit cards, but you can overdraw and get fees charged.

* Discounts for cash are still a thing because the CC charge isn't available. People get things like cash back on their spend, but then pay more for the card in the first place.

* Everyone worries about their credit score that changes in magical ways depending on different weird spending rules that have incentives for taking on debt but only in certain patterns that they won't tell you.

Re: Simple Bank Is Closing

#517

Post by pgporada »

jurassic wrote: post #291

Simple had some good ideas, but I eventually moved on to more "grown up" banking solutions. What caused me to leave was the inability to write paper checks, which I only needed once or twice a year but is a useful and reasonable-to-expect feature in a "checking" account. Going to a web form and requesting they mail a check on my behalf wasn't an adequate replacement for my needs... scenarios like money in a Christmas…

I use their checks several times a month. I was angry when BBVA canned the webform to check feature. Prior to that, Bancorp did not offer checkbooks, but had the webform feature.

Re: Simple Bank Is Closing

#518

Post by heliodor »

tadfisher wrote: post #332
orange_tee wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot blame the founders. They worked hard and risked a lot and were successful so they want to cash out. Here's a radical idea. Maybe if countries care so much about keeping markets competitive, they could buy out late-stage startups to allow them to keep operating independently.

In our case, Simple was at the end of its runway and desperately needed a buyer after our primary angel backed out. BBVA was there at literally the last second (as in, we may not have been able to make the next payroll). So yeah, it wasn't really about the founders wanting to cash out; they desperately wanted to keep the idea going.

Have the founders tried to find a buyer for Simple to pull it out of BBVA and save it from being shut down?

Re: Simple Bank Is Closing

#519

Post by Slippery_John »

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…

I've used Simple since they became available on Android. At the time I had an account with Wells Fargo, but it was just a nightmare. I was working minimum wage, more or less paycheck to paycheck. I had been burned several times by those predatory overdraft fees, and they had started to introduce minimum balance fees.

Switching to Simple was a breath of fresh air. I didn't have to worry about any of those fees anymore. I could look at their tiny list of possible fees and know what to expect rather than having to deal with the nightmare of poor information that I had before. They saved me so much money, and helped me get out of the paycheck-to-paycheck spiral.

Like you the budgeting feature have been incredibly powerful for me too. Being able to hide away money without risking an overdraft or declined payment was a game changer.

Now I find myself in a very unfortunate position where I'm not even in the states so I'm not sure how I'm going to manage a switch to somebody else.

Re: Simple Bank Is Closing

#520

Post by Maxburn »

I had Simple bank back when it was new on the scene and kept it for a number of years.

As a homeowner it was annoying at times, I remember paying taxes and tags for vehicles was a problem because Simple didn't want to work with government entities so ever year I'd have a hassle of using another bank to do that. The limits on money spend was also a problem, I remember getting a new HVAC system in the house and having to split payment over two different days. Rather embarrassing for me to the installer voicing concerns, annoying that I can't spend my own money when I obviously have it. Finally lack of paper checks you wouldn't think would be a problem these days but a couple times of year it still came up and I was forced to use another bank and transfer funds.

It was an interesting experiment but after I moved to USAA (or any other real bank) in comparison all my troubles just disappeared.

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