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Comment by pmorici | Hacker News Reader

I don't see why anyone would use Simple for Banking. They don't pay any great interest rates at least not that they advertise and their features are equivalent to what you can get with CapitalOne360 formerly ingDirect but those guys will pay you interest on your deposits.

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Looking at the numbers, if you have $10,000 in your checking account, CapitalOne360 Checking pays .2% APR while Simple pays 0.01%. With $10,000 in your account, that's a difference of $19 / year. To me, that's negligible. Especially with inflation being an order of magnitude higher than both.

https://home.capitalone360.com/rates https://www.simple.com/policies/rates/

There is no minimum balance at Capital One 360 to get 0.2% interest.

Neither is there a minimum balance for Simple, unless I'm missing something.

Do you get good interest rates anywhere? Last time I checked at banks I think checking accounts had .06% and even a long term CD was around 0.9%.

I'd be better off just playing the market at that point (or using something like betterment/wealthfront to hold most money).

Simple is nice because the interface/app are solid and they have incredible customer service. The only other thing I'd want from them is a decent rewards credit card.

The best I've found are with Ally -- 0.85% for a MM account and 0.25% for a checking account. Still pretty meaningless, which is why, despite banking with Ally, I keep a sizable amount of my money in Betterment.

Sure, a capitalone360 Checking account will give you 0.85% for certain balance minimums.

"Certain balance minimums" in this case means over $100k. Until you get over $50k it's only 0.20%.

Credit Unions in my area (Portland, Or) have checking accounts that pay 1.0%-1.5%. No interest from Simple is the main reason I don't use them.

Based on your average monthly balances in checking, is this really more than a few thousand a year? To me, the Simple app is worth at least that.

If you have 120k with an interest rate of 1.0%, you are basically losing out on about $3.33 a day. In one year, you end up losing out on the amount of money you would need to buy a nice UHD monitor. It's simply not worth it, IMO.

Who keeps $120k sitting in checking earning 1%? That's underwater against inflation.

I am baffled by anyone who peaks their checking account beyond 30-40k.

I am a customer of theirs. It's quite limited, and I don't think I can recommend it unfortunately. They're nice people and their support is peerless, but people don't tend to choose a bank on those criteria.

The interest I receive for my day to day bank account is pretty meaningless. I use simple because of their budget tools.

I'm sure CapitalOne has "budget tools" marked off of some internal checklist but imagine it's pretty crappy.

Giving up a few bucks a month in exchange for a great budgeting tool is the reason I use Simple.

No, but I don't choose a bank because they have budget tools, you can easily use Mint for that for free if you need that sort of thing.

Mint is terrible compared to having the budgeting tool directly integrated with your banking account.

How so? I efficiently budget with Mint. It's able to consolidate all of my family's accounts and seems to do a great job at categorizing.

Mint has never worked for my wife. When she's out looking to spend all of our money she doesn't want to be bothered trying to open up mint and get a current snapshot of our finances. She also doesn't care about our 401k or brokerage accounts.

The only thing which has worked is the Simple app that by opening it tells her exactly how much money she can spend without sabotaging her savings goals.

I don't want interest on my deposits. I want a simple bank where if I put X money in, I can take X money out. That's it.

I would use it, but I can't because I have a working US visa and they only let you make an account if you're a US citizen.

Every single bank allows you to do what you want.

Sorry, I should've clarified. I want that and _only_ that. I don't other things that typical banks offer, because they create complexity where I want none and waste my time with spammy offers that I'm not interested in. I don't want to be using/understand only 5% of my bank's capabilities.

I keep a few hundred bucks in a Simple account just so I get access to more ATMs. Other than that, they've been pretty underwhelming. A slick smartphone app doesn't make up for all their other lacking features.

That's my point, you can get free access to AllPoint ATMs with a capitalone360 checking account and they pay interest and you don't have to worry about multiple bank accounts. Which is why I'm surprised anyone would bother with Simple.

Yeah but that slick phone app means you find out immediately when $.02 of interest is added to your account. Hard to overstate the importance of that, you know.

They had a fancy interface, but that's about it. I'll stick with my credit union that I know won't try to fuck me over.

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