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Comment by ericcholis | Hacker News Reader

Simple[1] is pretty close. Create "Goals" for any amount and time period, Save $X by Y Date . Simple automatically allocates money to your Goals from your Available Balance daily, every friday, or any other schedule. They show you a "Safe to Spend" balance which is your Available Balance minus your total Goals. You can associate a Goal with a spending category, say Groceries, and have all transactions marked Groceries come out of the Goal rather than your Safe to Spend balance.

1) http://www.simple.com

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I was a Simple customer from when they were still in beta, and I really loved them and talked a fair number of people into opening accounts with them over the years. Things went really downhill after a while.

Moving physical addresses was a total shitshow. It involved them snail-mailing two verification codes. One to the current address and one to the new address. And you had to be able to collect them both and get them entered within a certain time frame. (Really inconvenient when moving from Texas to NYC).

And then got a new banking partner and had to basically re-enroll everyone again with a time component. There was a web form that crashed immediately when I entered my information because they couldn't verify my address. I filed a ticket immediately, which they didn't follow up on. When I followed up on it, they said it was a known issue and they were working on it. No worries, I'll get an extension.

Eventually after me calling several times to ask about it, they just said that there were issues with some of their oldest accounts that just couldn't be resolved. So I could Re-enroll from scratch on their website. Which I did. And immediately got flagged as fraud because I already existed as a customer.

Eventually, they told me I would just have to find a different bank, and they were closing my account in 7 days, and they were going to keep any money left in the account at that point.

I was pretty livid.

And the goal system was theoretically really cool. I liked it a lot. But it never really worked correctly because the goal tag wouldn't stick from the Auth to the Settlement. So anything you had flagged when you made a purchase you had to re-flag when the purchase was no longer pending. It was a great idea but somehow they never figured out quite how to relate the Auths to the Settlements in their user database. Which is pretty scary.

Anyway, long story short, up until a couple years ago, I would've completely agreed about Simple being a good option. But I can't warn people away fast enough after all of the garbage I've had with them.

Sounds like a perfect storm of terrible experiences. I've used them for over a year without any issues. Hopefully I don't come across the same experience you had.

You didn't even mention when cards didn't work for three days for "maintenance"

Surprisingly I grinned and bared it until I decided the world wasn't ready for life without checks, unfortunately.

> the world wasn't ready

Your world. The US. There are plenty of countries where checks were phased out many decades ago. :-)

Well, that is where Simple operates.

I had the exact same experience. Customer for years from the early public beta and watched their service get progressively worse post-acquisition. Eventually when they made the switch to BBVA my account was unable to be moved over despite months of back and forth with their support team. Eventually I switched to Schwab and I’ve been a happy customer ever since. It’s more work to manage, but I get so much more utility out of my money today.

I'm so happy to hear about your pain with the new banking partner. I thought I was the only one. That alone almost made me abandon them for good.

They just created a new goals system that "locks" off your money more than original goals. It seems like a good system, I need more experience to really say.

I still love Simple. But they made it readily apparent that I need to have funds in multiple banks to stay financially safe.

> Eventually, they told me I would just have to find a different bank, and they were closing my account in 7 days, and they were going to keep any money left in the account at that point.

Is that even legal? If so it sounds like an extraordinary loophole.

Doubt that's legal. I've had a few hundred bucks I lost track of in an ING account a decade ago that I was able to collect through CA collections. They can't just keep it. Smells super shady.

I liked the idea of simple, but didn't like the fact they couldn't send me checks to use. They'll mail them on my behalf but not send me an actual checkbook to hold onto for one off situations. I rarely use them, but sometimes contractors or landlords prefer this method or charge exorbitant fees to use a credit card.

Also if I come into a decent size amount of a cash payment, I can't walk into a bank to deposit it. Mailing in straight up cash seems super weird to me.

Downstream of you handwriting a check is a hundred million dollar quagmire of process and tech to deal with the aftermath of your dead tree scribbles.

Just let them mail it... Simple!

Would just much rather use a real bank that lets me write checks for free (was a BankSimple beta user, and left after they were acquired by BBVA).

Hey I'm with you. I would love for those to go away and everything work off of digital transactions but some property managers (even in new complexes!) pay for some poor saas solutions that use a mix of dated tech and charge ridiculous fees that almost force people to not use it.

Workaround for both of these things are postal money orders. PMO's are basically checks in every way that matter, to the point where I've yet to find anyone who won't let me use one if they accept checks.

$1.95 per $1000 is pretty reasonable as far as fees go. If you want to deposit cash, you just get a money order for the amount, make it out to yourself, and use their photo check deposit. Funds available next business day.

If you need to pay someone, you buy a PMO with your debit card.

It's kind of an annoying requirement, but it beats the hell out of dealing with the banks in my area.

Yeah except a lot of debit cards have a $500 daily transaction limit.

They usually have a limit for withdrawing cash, but not a limit for POS purchases.

Huh, this is something I've never had to deal with or even knew existed. But yeah that makes sense. Appreciate the response for future reference I ever need to do this. I also agree that's not much of a fee and this would be a super rare scenario.

FYI, they just started offering paper checks. It's in beta I believe. I received my first Simple checkbook and wrote a check just a couple weeks ago.

Cool. Now they just need to give better interest rates compared to Schwab and Ally. :)

That's Random Startup #347 ;) I have considered trying Simple but not gotten around to it yet.

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