Ride Free Fearless Money

Saving money is energetically telling yourself you will have and deserve a future. It creates possibility, including the possibility of not using a credit card you don’t want to for an unforeseen future expense.

Whether it’s $10 a month or $500: please, open a savings account at an FDIC-insured bank and regularly deposit into it. You will never be sad about it no matter the amount you save.

*Online savings options*

These are online-only, FDIC-insured banks you can setup monthly/weekly/annual automated withdrawals from your account. I like these because then I put a savings line in my budget, and then each month the money just goes away and I don’t blow it on rainbow pretzels.

There is no charge to use these, and you should not be paying a bank to hold a savings account for you. You can only access your money online, and it usually takes 2-4 days for a transfer to process, and often there is a limit to the number of transfers you can do in a month.

Here are two with good (for savings accounts) returns right now:

ALLY 1.00%
https://www.ally.com/bank/online-savings-account

CIT Savings 1.05%
https://www.bankoncit.com/high-yield-savings

*Automatic Saving & Investing*

Something I hear often is “I don’t know where I’m going to get the money.” Enter, algorithms and encrypted APIs that datamine your bank account and use math to take money and save/invest it for you. Creepy? Yes. Does it work for some people? Yes.

Acorns – This is an app that rounds up your purchases to the nearest dollar and then puts the money in a mutual fund investment at the risk level of your choosing, technically an ETF fund:
https://www.acorns.com/
Since you have to connect your bank account[s] it’s a bit invasive & potentially data-miney, but if you: make a lot of transactions per month, think you’ll have $50 or more going in each month, and are otherwise not sure how to find the money” to invest, it may help you.

Digit –  This is an app that does something similar, but with a savings account instead of an investment:
https://digit.co/about/how-it-works

I’d advise trying these, with the caveat below, if:

• you’re not sure where your money to save will come from,
• you’re tech+ and curious how technology could help you
• you feel you can have $50-$100 randomly come out of your account in a month without stressing out

Pro tip: Try one, see what it “recommends” or “finds” that you can save/invest, and then unsubscribe to the service and assign that amount monthly to a regular savings/investing account like the ones above. Then, you’ve got the power of planning and knowing what’s happening on your side (plus you might find it easier to manage).