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Comment by pitaj

17 hours ago

You can pay bills from your savings account with ACH in the US.

Interesting perspective. So, if I'm understanding you correctly, the pitch here would be:

1. Paycheck DD → straight to savings

2. "Spending money" for in-person transactions → transfer periodically to checking

3. Use debit card to spend from checking.

That's an interesting idea. Actually what is intriguing to me is another angle: I'd still never consider spending with debit. But my problem is that it's essentially impossible to get an ATM card that isn't a debit card anymore, meaning if I want to be able to use an ATM, I have to carry this stupid card around that would be easy to use to drain my checking account. With your approach, if I can get a savings account that is not linked to a checking account, I could use that as my default place where I pay my rent and credit card bills from. But it's a big if, because a lot of savings accounts have limits on how many withdrawals they can have per month, probably a residue of that regulation that someone else said was recently repealed.

While Regulation D was lifted a few years ago, there are often still restrictions to the number of withdrawals one can do from a lot of savings accounts.