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Column – a chartered bank for developers

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Re: Column – a chartered bank for developers

#91

Post by dragonwriter »

arcticbull wrote: post #83
dragonwriter wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think if you only have your mortgage as an asset Your mortgage is a liability, not an asset.

It really isn't if the interest rate is below inflation. If it's below inflation, the mortgage is yielding real-dollar value. That's an asset in my eyes. It's a calendar spread. Last year, you were buying 2021 dollars for a fixed rate (2.675% APR in my case), but you different vintage dollars over time. You owe 2022 dollars in 2022, and 2031 dollars in 2031. A 2051 dollar is almost certainly going to be worth signifi…

> It really isn't if the coupon rate is below inflation

It's a liability in the amount of the balance. I suppose you could consider the present value of the “income” stream of the difference between inflation and interest over the life of the loan as an asset, but unless it's a very unusual loan, any income stream of that kind is likely to be a transitory effect, and interest is likely to be be a real as well as nominal expense considered over the life of the loan.

Re: Column – a chartered bank for developers

#92

Post by bombcar »

VincentEvans wrote: post #64
giorgioz wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you name your bank please so to make it a negative review on their bad business practises?

It’s a credit union called Trumark. On a related note - it appears to me that credit unions are no longer what the conventional wisdom said they are either - a small community and customer-minded institution. In practice - I frequently see them being bought up or transferring management and resembling the national chains in how they operate more and more. Not sure what the difference is to be honest.

Credit unions "legally" have to be owned by the customers, but this doesn't guarantee they'll be any good.

Many of them decided "going online" was too hard, and outsourced all that stuff to providers. It can take some research to find a good local credit union that actually works well, and sometimes you have to accept the way they do things vs how you want to do things.

Our local credit onion services AND holds 10 year mortgages, everything else they resell and service for awhile, but the servicing may get sold off, too. This can mean that even if you find a perfect bank to borrow from that changes shortly after you sign.

Or you can switch some stuff to the massive brokerage houses, which all have associated banks and pretty decent staff/cost/features.

Re: Column – a chartered bank for developers

#93

Post by arcticbull »

dragonwriter wrote: post #91
arcticbull wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really isn't if the interest rate is below inflation. If it's below inflation, the mortgage is yielding real-dollar value. That's an asset in my eyes. It's a calendar spread. Last year, you were buying 2021 dollars for a fixed rate (2.675% APR in my case), but you different vintage dollars over time. You owe 2022 dollars in 2022, and 2031 dollars in 2031. A 2051 dollar is almost certainly going to be worth signifi…

> It really isn't if the coupon rate is below inflation It's a liability in the amount of the balance. I suppose you could consider the present value of the “income” stream of the difference between inflation and interest over the life of the loan as an asset, but unless it's a very unusual loan, any income stream of that kind is likely to be a transitory effect, and interest is likely to be be a real as well as nomi…

Indeed, you are of course correct! I'm just hoping folks look at mortgages not as a strictly bad thing, but as a tool in their financial arsenal. They can be good! I think most folks are stuck in nominal dollar mode, and it can really help to look at things in real dollar terms.

I think I may have been loose with my words.

Re: Column – a chartered bank for developers

#94

Post by molsongolden »

tome wrote: post #66
whockey wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US (and most countries) in order to get access to the central bank (in the US the fed) and do 'banking things' like holding money, moving money, and lending money you have to have a banking charter. We have a national charter (issued by the OCC) but you can also have some other more bespoke charters as well!

So what's a non-chartered bank?

Many neobanks/fintechs aren’t chartered banks, they’re customer experience layers built on top of a partner bank’s infra.

Re: Column – a chartered bank for developers

#96

Post by igrav55 »

strzalek wrote: post #2

Hey, I’m an ex-Square that is part of founding engineering team at Column. My team will be monitoring this thread and we’ll be happy to answer any questions! Especially those about ACH, I’m sure you have plenty and we know it through-out!

This looks awesome! A few questions:

- Will there be an openapi spec to generate clients in most languages?

- Do you support depositing checks via the dashboard?

- Out of curiosity, what database are you using for high availability?

Re: Column – a chartered bank for developers

#97

Post by rundmc »

whockey wrote: post #31
mdaniel wrote: post #18

> Create account numbers that point to a single bank account and create specific permissions and limits for each one. I love that; there are so many places that give a 6% discount for using ACH but I don't want to give out my bank account details willy-nilly --- If you have influence over it, I wouldn't recommend having https://status.column.com/uptime default to "Sandbox" since I doubt seriously that's what anyone w…

I'm glad you noticed the account numbers as pointers concept - we think its pretty cool. I think there's some rad use cases that people will come up with! Thanks on the typo...deploying now :0

We have been looking for a US banking provider that could handle this. Woo hoo.

In RoW they are called virtual IBANs. Numerous use cases.

Re: Column – a chartered bank for developers

#98

Post by VincentEvans »

mjmahone17 wrote: post #72
arcticbull wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Have you ever heard how you could pay off your mortgage a lot quicker by making bi-weekly payments instead of monthly? Or how you can include extra with your payment and instruct your bank to apply it directly to the premium, helping you reduce your interest? Generally speaking you don't want to do that. A mortgage with an interest rate of like 3% (to which anyone in the last year refinanced or, or got on purchase…

You don’t want to do this now, but there’s a reasonable world we end up in where either inflation hovers at 1%, like most the last 5 years (so you earn 2% by paying down a mortgage, vs -1% when putting it into a savings account), or interest rates stabilize at 10%, or both! Also some people just hate having debt, and so they want to pay down debts as quickly as possible. Even if it’s “irrational” their goal is to pay…

Answering both you and GP I belong to the “some people” group you described in your post. It’s not that I don’t understand the math, it’s just that I don’t have the mental capacity and time in my life to take advantage of this arbitrage.

To illustrate - I have an acquaintance who transfers money between credit cards to take advantage of points, and sign-up offers etc. Were I to engage in such activity myself - assuming I know anything about myself at all, it is that I will 100% forget some detail or date and end up getting charged all of the delayed interest making me worse off than if I didn’t engage in such a scheme at all.

So it’s like that. Rather than chasing some optimization in a half-ass manner, I’d rather just pay off the debt and pay less of my money to the bank.

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