If you have 6 months expenses saved, you don't need same day access. You keep 1 month in an immediate access account and 5 in the high yield savings account.
Financial services users should be able to have access to and be able to move their funds through financial plumbing inexpensively and rapidly. Fix the plumbing, raise the bar with regulations on financial services providers to commodify the offerings.
That seems like a perfect use case for using a credit card to cover the expense and then pay yourself back when your money moves out of the savings account.
I have trouble imagining a case outside of a hostage situation where you would need access to your emergency fund same day.
Fundamentally, I should not have to explain why I would desire immediate access to my own cash reserves at a moment's notice to excuse broken financial infrastructure.
> Fundamentally, I should not have to explain why I would desire immediate access to my own cash reserves at a moment's notice to excuse broken financial infrastructure.
Yes, if you are investing in less-liquid assets to get a better RoI then you absolutely do. If you don't like the terms then you are free to keep your cash in your checking account.
If the settlement isn’t rapid, you can’t guarantee the funds will actually settle (checks). Lots of situations where someone wants the same guarantee as cash or a wire.
Back in the 90s, I tried to pay for a computer with a certified check and CompUSA treated it as a likely counterfeit.
Writing a check is instantaneous, but you obviously don't mean that.
If you're talking about wires and the like, then what you're really paying for is the sending institution taking on liability if there turns out to be a cascading problem.
http://www.classic-carauction.com/featured-cars?auctionid=10...
Personally, if I'm expecting to make a large cash purchase I have more than a few days notice.
Much more within reach to bid on a regular used car at the common auctions that regular used car dealers buy from.
Or you could purchase more leisurely from the dealer on his terms.
Either way their offices will often display a tattered old sign: _Cash Talks and BS Walks_.
That you have to go into your specific physical branch to do certain things is ridiculous. I can go into any Chase in the US and do anything I could do at my normal “home” branch.
N26 (a German bank) was vastly superior but even that had limitations, especially with moving money around internationally.
The grass is always greener on the other side.
The only downside is that you don't have a physical branch you can go into but you can do basically anything online without ever interacting with anyone, or at worst you can always call them. Those are real banks btw, not pseudo-bank fintech companies.
I'm sure they do in North America too, and make orders of magnitude more from it than for charging monthly or transaction fees. But if everyone else charges those, why not make that bit extra too?
It just needs some 'disruptor' to do it for free and drive the rest of them down, as is happening both there and here in Europe with trading accounts (where most money is made from order flow, but traditionally, why not make a bit extra from commission too?).
But the improvement in payments was mostly driven by legislation (e.g. the Payment Services Directive from 2007 with most of implementation at 2012) without which banks were quite happy to offer payments as slow and expensive as they could as it was too profitable for the industry to voluntarily agree to disrupt this, especially since most payments are cross-bank and so a single "defecting" institution can't simply offer cheap&fast payments if others don't want to play ball.
So I don't think that there's any way how USA financial industry might get to a similar point if gov't doesn't decide to force them (which might be taboo for many USA politicians) - I'm certainly convinced that European financial institutions would not have reached this point currently if they weren't forced to do so despite all the lobbying.
They sell insurance and offer consumer investment accounts -- which are not permitted for us citizens!
Current 3m euribor is -0.4% so 1.6% interest rate means 2% margin. Assuming that your initial costs of selling/assessing/processing the mortgage are covered with fees, something like 0.5% would be enough to cover the main (non-systemic) risks and expenses for decent quality mortgages, so you get 1.5% of pure profit; for every billion in your portfolio you'd get 15 million profit each year; Dutch banks have 500B of housing loans so that's a capacity of something like 7-8 billion of profit per year from housing loans alone.
And various short-term loans have lower volumes, but much higher interest rates and room for profitability.
Looking at the stats in https://www.statista.com/topics/3442/the-banking-sector-in-t... it's clear that the net interest income dominates, it's something like 5x the fee income.
Can you share a "good" bank account?
I've moved after 36 years in the states -- and was shocked at the quality of ING Bank.