If you're not already earning 5% on all your cash, including your checking account, then by the end of this episode, I hope you have everything you need to stop leaving money on the table and simplify your finances. Almost every regular checking account, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Chase, they have all the features and all of them pay about 0% interest and are not directly connected to an account that pays any meaningful amount.

If you're wondering whether it's really worth switching, I guess it depends a little bit on how much cash you have, but they're actually our accounts. They have almost every feature of a checking account and earn 4% to 5% interest. So what are these magical accounts? Hello, I'm Chris, and this is All The Hacks, a channel about upgrading your life, money, and travel.

And today we're focusing on bank accounts. Now, there are thousands of checking and savings accounts out there. I've looked at and even signed up for dozens of the best ones as research for this episode so that I can help you earn the most interest, have a great bank account to operate your life out of, keep things simple, and have a great banking experience.

And it's not purely altruistic. I did a lot of this because I also wanted to find the best bank account for me. And the reason this is so hard is that most checking accounts pay almost 0% interest everywhere. And if there was a high-yield checking account that paid 4% to 5% interest, this would be a really easy conversation.

There actually are plenty of accounts that say they do this, but they're all filled with crazy requirements, caps on earnings, and other gotchas. For example, Fitness Bank is gonna give you 6% on your checking account as long as you average 10,000 steps a day and have 15 debit card transactions a month, meaning not earning your credit card points, and that rate only applies to the first $25,000 in your account.

If you can't hit your step goal or the card transaction goal, or you go over the limit, you're dropped down to almost nothing. Also, I found this bank, Primus, that claims around 5% and touts all these amazing things on the website. But if you go read reviews online, they're filled with rate drops after a few weeks, caps on withdrawals, funds getting held up, and customer service phone numbers that never get answered.

So we're gonna skip banks like that and narrow the landscape down to my top three recommendations. But I'm also gonna share how I evaluate accounts, the ways that you can set up your accounts for maximum interest earning, and simplicity. And at the end, I'll share my tips for automating your entire financial life.

I'm also gonna run through a few other accounts that didn't make the top three, but that you might already have, and how you can tweak your setup with them to earn more. If you like what you hear, please give us a thumbs up or hit the subscribe button to help us out with the algorithm.

And also, feel free to comment with a question, and I'll do my best to reply to all of them. Thank you so much in advance. Let's get into it right after this. So let's start with the features that you should be looking at when it comes to picking a primary bank account.

Some of these might be obvious, some you might not have thought of, and some might matter to me, but not matter to you. But the first one that I think is important to everyone is trustworthiness. I need a financial institution that I can trust. So to me, that doesn't just mean that money is protected by the FDIC or SIPC insurance.

It also means that I can trust that the bank's not just gonna randomly shut down my account, hold my funds, and do the kinds of things that after reading thousands of posts on Reddit, I think a lot of new banks do. So when it comes to actual features, here are the things that I think are required to make any bank account your primary bank account.

You need to get access to ACH account and routing numbers. Those are absolutely necessary if you wanna go pay bills, whether it's property tax or your credit cards. If you don't have an account and routing number, you can't operate this like a primary bank. Next is an ATM or debit card.

Now, I don't use the ATM that much, but when I'm traveling, I think it's absolutely the best way to get out foreign currency instead of trying to exchange money at the airport, carry cash, or anything like that. So I need a card that I can take money out of overseas, ideally with those fees reimbursed, but not necessarily.

As for a debit card, I don't use my debit card that much, so it's not that important to me, but there is one cool thing that I sometimes like to do, and that's if you purchase something on a credit card and you're returning it, and the merchant lets you return that to a debit card instead of a credit card, sometimes I'll do that so that the points I earned the first time don't get clawed back.

Next is some ability to send checks. Now, that could be somewhere online where I could fill out a payee, and I could send money online, and a check would get mailed to them. It could be that I just get a checkbook, and I can write checks the old-fashioned way.

Either one works, I just need a way to send a check. I don't have to do it that often, but if I do have to do it, there's usually not another option, and I just need to have that option. Next, because I'm married, I need to have some type of joint access to the account.

Now, many banks offer joint accounts, but some banks don't, but they do offer joint access, meaning a way for another person to get a debit card or an ATM card, to log in, to send transfers, and all those things. So whether it's a joint account or not might be a requirement for you, depending on your relationship, but it's not absolutely necessary for me.

I also need the ability to do mobile deposit. Every now and then, I get something like a tax refund, or a check in the mail, and if I couldn't deposit that check in from my phone, then I don't know what I would do, so I absolutely need that feature.

Next is reasonable limits. There are some accounts out there that I looked at that on the surface look great, except they might have limits like $5,000 a day, or $10,000 a month, and if I'm not able to make the payments I need to regularly, withdraw money as I need it, send it as I need it, it would be a real big problem for me, so reasonable limits are necessary.

Next is wire transfers. Now, not everyone will have this requirement. It's not something I do day-to-day, week-to-week, or even month-to-month, but a few times a year, I need the ability to make a wire transfer. It might be related to business, it might be related to an investment. I've had to do it a few times when we've bought a home, and so that's absolutely something that I need access to do for my account.

Some banks charge a fee for it, some don't. I'll get to, in a few seconds, about why the fees aren't as important to me at this point, but being able to send a wire transfer is important. And then the last is I need some way to make recurring transfers to third parties.

So for us, we pay our au pair every week on Friday. I need some way to automate that process. I wanna be able to send money to her, or if you have a gardener, or a cleaner, or any other type of nanny or childcare, and you wanna be able to make that payment regularly, and the person you're paying doesn't have any type of automated billing system, that's something that I really want.

I have had an account that had this service called PopMoney associated with it. A lot of people use Zelle for this purpose. And then there's other banks that have ways to set up recurring transfers. Now, the important thing here is that it's to a third party. There are many bank accounts that will let you set up recurring transfers between accounts titled in your name, but they won't let you set those transfers up to people whose names aren't titled on the account.

And so if you set up this account with a partner, and those kinds of transfers are important, then it might be really important to have a joint account that allows both people to be on the title, so you can make those transfers. For us, that's not a problem. Now, there are a ton of bank accounts that offer all of those features.

In fact, most of the bank accounts you'll find do. So what do we optimize for amongst all of them? What I'm looking for is my net after-tax yield. Now, I could just say, what's the amount of interest I'm earning? Is it 5%, 3%, 0%? And the reason I say net after-tax yield is two important things, the net and the after-tax.

So the net means subtracting fees. If a bank had a really high interest rate, but charged money for overseas ATM withdrawals, charged money for wires and transfers, charged money for deposits or anything like that, or had a monthly fee, well, then that extra percent or two of yield doesn't really matter.

And then separate from that is after-tax. And that's somewhat important because there are ways to earn interest on your cash that may, depending on what states you live in, give you a better tax advantage result. So for example, if you invest some of your cash in US treasuries or ETFs or mutual funds that invest in those treasuries, the income from that might actually be state tax-free.

So the ability to invest my cash in something that would be state tax-free is certainly an advantage, which is why I'm gonna compare things as such. Now, if there are some accounts that have all those features, they have the best interest rates and they're all pretty comparable, what are some tiebreakers that you might wanna consider when you're looking for an account?

So one is simplicity. I love keeping things simple. The ability to have a bank account at the same place as your brokerage account, your retirement accounts, your 529, HSA, credit cards, mortgage or auto loans, any of those things is great. It's not a requirement, but man, if it's neck and neck and one of them is more simple and I already have an account there, that'd be great.

Next is a good user experience. That's like web UI, UX, does it feel modern? Do they have a good mobile app? Is it a good experience using the product? That's really important. Not a requirement, but really important. Similar to that is whether the account actually works with aggregator sites.

So for example, there are a few services like Plaid, Yodlee, Finicity, MX, which is how you link your bank accounts to third-party services. And so I use Copilot to track all of our finances and all of our spending. I wanna be able to link my accounts to those services so that I can pull in those transactions without having to manually do that.

I would suggest trying to see if your account has this, if it works, and if it stays linked for a week before transitioning to any new bank account, it's really important. Might not be a requirement for you if you don't use any of those services, but I'm always testing out new products.

And so having that is really important to me. Not a deal breaker if it's a bad bank account, but something I'd love. Next is the ability to title your account in a trust. Now, a lot of people set up revocable trusts so that they're able to give a little bit more control over where their assets go, where they'd pass away.

And also because if you have money over a certain threshold in a lot of states, your estate goes through probate, which is effectively a type of court where a judge is assigned and gets to determine where things get allocated, oftentimes aligned with your intent from your will or something like that.

But it's just a process that costs money and takes time and in many states, a public record. So I'd love to avoid that. So if you have more assets than whatever your limit is in your state, I think in California, it's about $185,000. You might want a trust account.

However, keep in mind, and I am not a lawyer, but if the majority of your assets are titled in a trust and just one account that is under that limit is not in the trust, you will usually be just fine avoiding probate courts. And there's something called a pour-over will that would basically say anything that I didn't title in my trust, allow it to transfer over.

Now, these kinds of trusts, these revocable trusts that I'm talking about, these are not these fancy kinds of trusts that people set up for asset protection or tax avoidance. They're very different. I did a whole episode on trusts. You can go back and listen to. We did go into some of these kind of unique trusts that are usually not revocable.

They're irrevocable, but that's just something to keep in mind. Next, I mentioned the ability to send checks, but if all things are equal and I could also get a checkbook for the one or two times that it might come in handy, great, not a hard requirement. I guess the backup to that would be if you really need to send a check, you could go get a money order without having a bank account.

Another feature that I really like, but I'm not gonna put in the required bucket is the ability to set up savings buckets. So the ability to create different areas for different types of cash. So maybe you're setting aside money for tuition or an emergency fund or to pay off a certain loan, the ability to kind of virtually set that up or spin up other accounts to segregate that money would be really a feature that I would like to have, but I don't need.

Automation is another one, just ways that you can automate more in your financial life. Next is a high FDIC insurance limit. Now, this usually doesn't matter because most financial institutions, if not all of them that are registered as banks in the United States have a $250,000 limit that actually is per person on the account.

So if it's a joint account with two people, it would actually go up to 500,000. I don't know about you guys, but I usually don't keep that much money in cash at all, but it could be relevant if you're saving for something large, like a down payment for a home or something like that.

And so if an account had a higher FDIC limit, that'd be great. And then last, Zelle is a feature that I don't use that often. I have used it in the past. If a bank had Zelle, it would be a bonus for me. Though there is a hack that I'll share, which is that the Zelle app lets you use a debit card of a bank that doesn't support Zelle to send payments with Zelle.

It does have lower limits and it can't set up recurring payments. But if you do need to send money over Zelle and you don't have Zelle built into your bank, you can use it in that way. So that's a lot of features, I know. I actually have a table that I'm looking at right now, and it has all these features across 39 different rows, 20 different accounts that I narrowed down to.

And I'm gonna reference some of the things in this table as I go through this conversation. But I recently got a few requests from all the Hacks members to share more of this kind of research that I'm doing with members. So starting with this episode, I'm gonna do two new things every time I do a solo deep dive.

And I'm gonna, one, share that spreadsheet. I'm gonna share the research with members that I use to organize all of my research. And two, I'm actually gonna schedule a call with all of our members where people can go deeper, ask me questions on anything I've covered today, or maybe even didn't cover.

If you're interested in becoming All The Hacks member, you can do that at allthehacks.com/join. Okay, now let's jump into the accounts, and there are a few different types. So a couple that I'm gonna say are worth mentioning briefly because they do exist, but are not eligible for this conversation because they just don't have the features to be your primary bank account.

The first are accounts focused just on savings. And so there are a handful of banks out there that have either high-yield savings accounts only, or banks like M1 or Titan or Public that have savings accounts that earn high interest, might even have really high FDIC insurance, but they don't give you all the functionality to make them your primary bank.

M1 is another one, and then the Vanguard Cash Plus account is another one. It actually does give you the ACH numbers you need to direct deposit and pay bills, but that's it. There aren't all the other features that you need for a primary bank. Now, if I did need an account just to earn interest on cash, I probably wouldn't go with any of these.

I'd probably just go with a brokerage account where I can invest in treasury ETFs or index funds, or even treasuries themselves, and get an even better after-tax return because of the state tax advantage, at least for me living in California. Or I'm pretty intrigued with the Wealthfront Automated Bond Ladder they just launched.

I have not gone deep on it, so I can't talk in much detail, but at a minimum, it's worth checking out the calculator they've built, even if you're not interested in the product, because what they do is they take your income, they take your state, your tax filing situation, and they show you what an amount of treasury interest would need to match from an account that didn't have that tax advantage.

So for example, they show that earning 5.21% in treasury interest for someone in California earning a lot of money is about the same as earning 6.17% in fully taxed interest, which by the way, is higher than every single account I'm going to mention today. So if you have a very large amount of cash that you're saving, that you want to be earning interest on, that is the path I would take over any high-yield savings account or anything similar.

Also, one other thing to keep in mind broadly when it comes to interest rates is that usually most of these banks are changing their interest rates relative to the effective federal funds rate. And when that rate goes down at a different Fed meeting, they might decide to cut rates or cut the guidance for rates, banks will drop their rates accordingly.

Now they don't all drop them at the exact same day, and you might find that some accounts look like they're earning a little bit more for a little bit longer. I just want to point out that the time in transit between banks, you're usually not earning any return. And so we actually did some analysis when I was working at Wealthfront, and they found that if someone were rate chasing throughout the year, trying to get the highest rate at a given point in time, they actually would have lost about 13% of their return due to the fact that they were spending so many days uninvested because they were moving their money between institutions.

So finding a bank that consistently pays high rates and not bouncing around can often be a much better outcome. Okay, so that's high yield savings accounts. Not something we're gonna cover, not something you can operate out of. The other account that I wouldn't suggest, but you can operate out of that doesn't meet my criteria is almost every regular checking account.

Now I've had ones at Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Chase, even JP Morgan, First Republic, SVB, which is now First Citizens. I've had the chance to have some of those at the bank's private bank practice, and then some of them are just regular accounts, and they're pretty much all the same.

They have all the features I talked about, checkbooks, account routing numbers, debit ATM cards, bill pay, most of them have Zelle, and all of them pay about 0% interest and are not directly connected to an account that pays any meaningful amount of interest. The only advantage I can give you for these banks is that they do have branches.

So if you need to go into a branch, you can. Sometimes on the higher end side, what I've seen from private banks is you get a lot more support. If you're looking for someone to help give you guidance or set up complicated tax or investment strategies, they can often be very helpful.

They usually have no fees and fee reimbursements at higher limits. But when it comes to earning yield on a cash operating account, like a checking account, I have never seen one at a regular financial institution that has banks around every corner, at least not in their primary checking accounts.

Now, if those accounts don't make sense, what does make sense? Now, at the very beginning of this episode, I said, unfortunately, I couldn't find a high-yield checking account that didn't have caps or all these problems or issues with holding accounts. So you can't just find a high-yield checking account.

That would make our lives too easy. So the general idea of what makes this super optimal is operating out of a savings account that has as many checking features as possible or can link directly with some type of overdraft protection to a checking account. Now, one thing important to understand is that the Federal Reserve used to have this rule called Regulation D.

And that rule limited the withdrawals and transfers from savings accounts to six per month, which made it really difficult for you to use a savings account as a primary account. Now, that was there to ensure that banks maintained adequate reserves, but when the pandemic happened, they temporarily lifted this limit.

And then by the end of 2020, they actually removed it entirely. Now, individual banks can still choose to enforce these limits, but they are not required at a federal level. So what you can do is you can find a savings account, and I'm gonna talk about all the ones that work, where you can operate completely out of that savings account, where you can earn interest on all the cash at a high rate and get most of the features you need, some form of bill pay, account routing numbers, and all of those things, but have a checking account set up at that same institution that's connected with overdraft protection, which would allow you to keep that checking account balance at zero, but be able to overdraw it by however much money is in your savings account.

So it's not a perfect all-in-one solution, and I'm actually gonna get to a few of those solutions after this, but it's a really good solution that works at a lot of different institutions. Now, keep in mind, a lot of institutions, but not all institutions. So for example, Betterment, UFB, Laurel Road, and Amex all have high-yield savings accounts connected to a checking account, but there's no overdraft protection.

So if you wanted to pay a bill or if you wanted to take money out of an ATM or spend your debit card, you would have to leave a balance in your checking account to be able to cover that. And so it doesn't allow you to operate entirely out of a savings account.

And why is this important? Well, if you have to leave a bunch of money in an account earning no interest, it really can cost you. So if you don't wanna leave $1,000 on the table, assuming that's the balance that you keep, you wanna find an account that has these overdraft features.

Now, the only other account that I'll mention that doesn't have them, that I have heard some people talk about is Acorns. And the reason why it's a little bit interesting is that they do have 5% savings and 3% checking. So you're not earning nothing on checking. So you could argue that maybe this is a good fit.

However, it's missing so many features. There are no wires in and out. There's no checks, no joint accounts, no overdraft. It costs $60 a year, has very, very low transfer limits. $7,000 in and out a day and 50,000 in and out a month, $5,000 cap on mobile deposits and a $500 limit on ATMs.

So I went in thinking that could be an option. I left thinking it is definitely not a good option, at least for my use case. As for the banks where there is a good option, there are four that are very, very similar. SoFi, Capital One, Discover and CIT. Now, all of them are paying between 4% and 5% interest.

And they all have all the main features you need, sending checks, depositing, being able to open a joint account, using Zelle, which actually just got launched to SoFi a couple days ago. And so on the surface, these are all really, really good options. Where are they different though? So obviously the interest rates are different.

At the time of publishing, CIT is at 5%, SoFi is at 4.6, Capital One and Discover are both at 4.25%. So where things are a bit different, I'm gonna take a look at the spreadsheet, is when it comes to wires. So, SoFi, for example, has $0 wires, but they only let you wire money for home purchases.

So you can't send money to other people. Capital One has wires, they cost $30. Discover has $30 wires, but you need to give them two to three days notice. CIT will give you wires for $10 or $0 if your balance is over 25,000. But you need to upload a form, and I have no idea how long that would take.

Another place that was a little bit different was transfer limits. Most of them are pretty similar. They have plenty of room for ATM withdrawals and daily in and out transfers. However, SoFi, I'm looking at my notes here, I just did a transfer where I didn't even complete it. I just typed in an amount and it told me how long it would take.

And so I put in $25,000 to see what it would say. And it said that $4,900 would come today, $3,000 would come in four days, and the rest would come in five days. So I'm not sure if that's just because it was a new account or what would happen.

I couldn't find any publishing of all of the details of those transfer limits. So I just say like slight, you know, yellow flag there for the SoFi account. They also have a maximum $5,000 for bill pay. So if you're regularly sending checks, that could come into a problem if you need to send checks over $5,000.

Otherwise, the accounts were pretty similar. CIT and Capital One looks like they allowed you to open up a trust account, which was cool. When it comes to FDIC limits, SoFi was the only one of those four that had higher than $250,000 limit, but you had to manually go into the settings page and enable it.

You couldn't just get it by default, which is just kind of annoying. Also CIT, when it came to reviews, is one that I would say proceed with caution and do your homework. It seemed like there were a lot of negative reviews and positive reviews, as opposed to mostly positive everywhere else, mostly around account suspensions and holds.

So I'd wanna dig a little deeper if I were gonna go that path. Finally, when it comes to transfer limits, SoFi was very explicit. They said, "We do not have a transfer limit on our savings account," which was nice. Capital One and Discover, on the other hand, in a lot of messages, people keep getting notices that they're over six transactions a month in their savings account, but so many people said they've been getting these notices for a few years and it's never been enforced that I feel reasonably confident that they're not gonna just start enforcing it all of a sudden, but they don't explicitly call out that they don't have those limits.

So that's a bit of the differences. There's a couple others in this bucket that I think are worth calling out, but they're a little bit different. Ally is one that is very popular amongst a lot of people I talk to. They have a savings account at 4.2% and a checking account at 0.25%.

And it's very close to being able to do what we've talked about, except that those overdrafts from checking to savings are limited to 10 times per month. And people I know with Ally accounts get a lot more aggressive notes about using their savings account to pay bills. And so if you have a lot of transactions coming in and out of your accounts, I feel like this could become a problem for you.

That said, they do have joint trust accounts and Zelle and some really great savings bucket features. So I think it's an option, but that limiting overdraft is a little bit of a problem for me. And at 4.2%, I'm still wondering where is the magic account that can get you 5%.

And I'm about to talk a few that will. So Robinhood is gonna give you 5% on savings and 0% on checking. Now, the reason this is slightly separate is it's a lot different than the ones I mentioned before. So first off, if you remember, Robinhood used to have a cash management account that paid interest and gave you checking features.

Well, they got rid of that and now they have an investing account and a spending account. And the investing account earns you 5% on your entire balance. You do need to have Robinhood Gold to get that interest rate, so it's $50 a year. You get 2.25 million in FDIC coverage and some of the features of a checking account.

You've got an ACH account and routing number so you can pay bills and deposit money from your paycheck. You've got bill pay, you can send wires, but you don't get an ATM card. They do have a spending account that earns no interest, but does give you an ATM card.

And funny enough, you can only overdraw the spending account with ATM and debit transactions. So if you were to hit that spending account with a bill pay for your credit card bill, it is going to bounce, even if you have enough money in your savings account. They also have a pretty low limit at $510 for ATM withdrawals.

Now, I noticed a lot of these new banks had a $510 ATM limit, even some of the other older banks. And I believe the reason for that is that they wanna make sure that they say, you can take out 500, the $10 is to cover the ATM fees. The one feature they're missing is there's no mobile deposit.

So it's a little messy in that you've got to operate these two accounts and there's some rules about how you use them and a low ATM fee, but on the bonus, the investing account does earn 5% and lets you invest that money in a brokerage account. Now you might want that to be separate.

You might want your brokerage account separate from your cash account, which I think I would. So for me, this would be a little bit messy, but it does get you up to that 5% interest here, which I think is better than all of the ones we just talked about, except CIT, which has its fair share of issues.

But then again, you've got to decide whether Robinhood has those issues for you also based on how you feel about that institution. I know there are a lot of people that have some strong feelings there. Also, I think it's important to mention that the Robinhood investing account is not a bank account.

It is a brokerage account. And the FDIC is what backs up bank accounts. CIPIC or the Securities Investor Protection Corporation is what backs up your brokerage account, but it doesn't back up all of the securities. It usually just backs up the cash in the account, but has similar limits, usually at around $500,000.

Now, a few things that are a little bit different between these two, because for a lot of people, they're kind of one in the same, but I did see a lot of people chiming in online about, "No, no, no, you need your money in a bank." One of those reasons is that banks are just more heavily regulated than brokerage firms.

So they have higher reserves. You can file complaints with the CFPB for banks, but I don't think you can for brokerage firms. But one thing that kind of at least resonates with me is that if you have all of your money in a bank and there were major problems and a major bank went under, FDIC is ultimately backed up by the US government.

The FDIC does have a fund to back up, but it is not enough that if all banks collapsed, it would be there to protect everyone. Now, if your money that is sitting in your brokerage firm as cash is invested in US government securities, then you're also just relying on the full faith and credit of the US government, just in a different way.

So between your cash position being covered by CIPIC and if you're invested in US treasuries, you're kind of in a situation where you're also just backed by the US government in a different method. One more thing that I know someone will mention is that when your money is sitting in a brokerage account, if it's being held at money market funds, it is possible for the value of those money market funds to drop.

Now, it's called breaking the buck and it actually happened in 2008 and people did lose money. Now, it looks from my research like everyone got back somewhere between 97 and 99% of their money, so it wasn't a massive loss. So having your money in a money market fund is not a guarantee, but those money market funds were not solely invested in US government securities.

The reason that they lost money is that they were holding a financial instrument called commercial paper and they were holding Lehman Brothers commercial paper, which ultimately is why they lost value, because the value of Lehman Brothers went to zero overnight. So I think if you are invested in a money market fund that is solely invested in US government securities, you're probably in a better financial situation.

But again, I am not a financial advisor, a CPA, a lawyer, so this is just my own opinion and my own personal thoughts. So I just wanted to cover that because there are a couple more options that I think are focused on brokerage that are really interesting. And one of the most loved accounts, when you look online, when you talk to people about amazing bank accounts, people consistently talk about the Schwab checking account.

And the primary reason is that it seems like Schwab pioneered reimbursing ATM fees worldwide. And so for those people who travel internationally, who know that withdrawing money from an ATM is usually the best way to get a good conversion rate and get foreign currency easily, people love the Schwab account.

Now, the downside is that it only earns 0.48% in your checking account. Now, the majority of people with a Schwab checking account probably also have a Schwab brokerage account, which is probably where most assets at Schwab are being held. So you do have a place that you can earn higher yield.

It's not a simple higher yield in that you just put money in the account and it earns, you need to invest that money in something, whether that's a money market fund invested in US treasuries or something else. It could be municipals to try to get even more tax advantage.

It could be stocks, but you do need to have that money invested. And it is linked, but there's not really any overdraw protection. So it kind of doesn't meet the requirements that I have of being able to have an account that earns high yield and being able to operate out of that account.

Now, the only reason I include it is because one, people seem to love it. It also gives you a checkbook, Zelle, joint trust accounts. Technically, they do have overdraft. So I felt like I needed to include it in this list, both because of its popularity and because technically you can overdraw that checking account.

So you could leave the balance at zero. However, instead of overdrawing and selling your cash position or selling your cash-like money market funds, they draw on margin against your brokerage balance and they take out a loan that you need to transfer money back to pay off. Now, if that money is only borrowed for a couple of days, then it probably isn't a massive amount of interest, but it's just, in my opinion, pretty messy, right?

Every time you wanna hit your checking account, you're ending up drawing a margin line, then you're paying off the margin loan and transferring money. It's not automated at all. Now, they do also charge for wires at $15 unless you have a balance over 100,000. In which case you get three free per quarter or all your wires are free over a million dollars.

So as much as I think people love the Schwab account, I think there are some way better options. Okay, I'm saving the best for last in this group of savings accounts that you can operate out of with a link checking account. And this is Mercury. And Mercury's historically focused all on business accounts, but they just launched personal accounts and I've had a chance to use it for the past month and it's really, really impressive.

And what they've done that's so unique is that they've added a lot of the features of a business checking account to a personal checking account. So that means you can spin up multiple users, you can give access to a bookkeeper, you can give access to your assistant, you can spin up multiple cards.

So you could even create a virtual card or a physical debit card for a nanny. You could even lock that card to specific merchant. So you could say, here is a card that only works at Whole Foods up to $500 a month. They also have a lot of other features when it comes to sending and receiving money.

One of which is really important to me is to be able to set up recurring transfers to third parties. So our au pair was able to say, here's my account routing number at Chase. And I was able to set up a recurring weekly transfer to pay her. To make that easy, they can also generate a URL that you can send someone that allows them to fill out banking information so that they can either send you money or so that you can receive money to them or push money to them.

Lots of options there. You can also upload bills. So let's say you're working on a home renovation project and a contractor sends you a bill, you can upload it. They'll OCR it, figure out the amounts and they can mail a checkout for that bill. They also reimburse ATM fees.

You get up to $5 million of FDIC insurance, free same day transfers with ACH, free wires. And best of all, that savings account earns 5%. And they actually have this feature on the business account called Mercury Treasury where you're able to move money to another account that earns yield on US treasuries.

And so I've been told that they're gonna be launching that feature soon, which would give you another savings bucket that you could use to potentially get a higher and taxed advantage to yield. So really excited about that. And the last unique feature that they have is a lot of different types of automations where you can set up specific rules and have things happen every single day.

And one of those is to leave a target balance in an account. So I mentioned that most of these accounts have overdraft between checking and savings. This account does not, but they do have automation. And so what I've done is I've set up, hey, leave my checking balance at $400, which earns 0%, but cost me about $20 a year.

And anytime that balance goes down or up, just level it off using the money in my savings account back to 400. What this does, because I don't actually use the checking account for really anything other than a potential ATM withdrawal, it allows me to be able to use my ATM card just in case if I need cash and then top that back up to 400.

So it doesn't have that overdraft functionality, but because you can pay all your bills from your savings account, because you can deposit your paycheck to your savings account, you don't really need the checking account for anything more than ATMs or debit cards. And I'm not really using my debit card, so it's just kind of an ATM issue.

And if I were needing to withdraw more than $400, it would probably take me 20 seconds in the app to move some extra money over. And because that automation runs daily at night, it's not something that's instantly gonna get moved back. So if I needed to take out $1,000, I could transfer over 600, withdraw 1,000, and that night it would get topped back up to $400.

So what's the downside? The downside is that Mercury is charging a $240 annual fee for their personal banking product. Now, even for me, I was like, what? How are you possibly charging a fee? None of these other banks charge fees, especially these banks that offer lots of premium services.

But at the end of the day, I really would love this product to exist, so I kind of understand it. And they're offering 5% interest, which is better than almost every other bank out there. So it seems like for the set of features and the interest, there is no other account that offers this.

So maybe you could argue that fee is justified. If it saves you even a couple of hours a year, then I guess you could say it's made up for in that reason. Or if you look at how many dollars that you would need to have earning 5% interest relative to 0%, it's about $5,000, and you'd pay the annual fee right away.

So if you're leaving $5,000 just in a Chase checking account earning zero, well then I guess earning 5% in the Mercury Savings account would do better than that. Few other cons, there's no joint accounts yet. Right now it says coming soon. Because you can spin up a login for your spouse, because you can create a debit card for your spouse and let them set up transfers and do all those things, I'm not sure how big of a deal that is.

Like I mentioned, there's no Overdraft and there's no Zelle, but I have used my Mercury debit card with the Zelle app, so that works there. So the idea of having a savings account to operate out of and a checking account with a few hundred dollars or even zero dollars just in case you need to use an ATM card is a pretty compelling solution.

However, wouldn't it be great if you could have one account? Well, I said there is no perfect all-in-one high-yield checking account, but there actually are three accounts, none of which are checking accounts, but that function almost just like one. They have almost every feature of a checking account and earn 4% to 5% interest.

So what are these magical accounts? Well, there's actually a fourth one and it didn't quite meet all the requirements, but I just wanna mention it in case anyone listening sends a lot of money internationally. And that's that Wise, which used to be called TransferWise, has an account that earns 4.85% interest, gives you an account routing number, ATM cards, huge transfer limits, and makes it really easy to send money overseas to lots of different currencies.

Downside, really low limits on the ATM card before paying fees, I think it's like $100 a day, there's no bill pay or mobile deposit, and even every transfer has a fee, but probably only relevant if you send a lot of money overseas. So let's jump into the three all-in-one accounts.

Let's start with the one that I've been using for a long time, and that's the Wealthfront Individual Cash Account. Right now it's paying 5% interest, has $8 million of FDIC insurance, they have automated savings, they have savings buckets called cash categories where you could separate money, you can send checks, got same day ACH, seven days a week, 365 days a year if you need to withdraw money to another account, you get an ATM card, account routing numbers, everything works from this account like you would expect with a few small things.

One, if you opt to open a Wealthfront Cash Account that is a trust or a joint account, you don't get any of these checking features. So the checking features are tied solely to an individual cash account. Two, there are wires, but you can only wire money to yourself or to an escrow or title company for the purchase of a home.

So if you do need to wire money to make an investment or to someone else, it's not gonna be possible. Transfer limits are pretty good, but I will note that the transfer out limit for ACH pulls, meaning if you were to make a payment online to the IRS or a credit card is at $50,000.

So if you are making really large payments to the IRS, you might have some problems here. Otherwise, it's been an amazing account to operate out of. They don't reimburse ATM fees, but you are earning 5% interest. You can even earn 5.5% interest if you make a referral or you're referred to the product.

And so I've used this account for a handful of years. The automation in it, I'm gonna talk about at the end of this episode when I talk about automating your finances, and it's really been a great account. The lack of the ability to have two logins or two ATM cards could be a really big deal breaker for someone operating their finances with a partner.

Next is the U.S. Bank Elite Money Market Account. Now it pays 4.25% interest. Seems they have ATM reimbursements. You get a checkbook, debit card. They even have a checking account that will overdraft into this account, but it's not clear why you would need it because it seems like you could do everything you want out of this account.

You get routing numbers, you can send wires, all of those things. The only downside is that there just aren't that many details about it. I looked online, I searched Reddit, I went as far as to almost open the account, and I did not do that yet, so that is one caveat.

But I couldn't find details on transfer limits and nuances about a lot of things. And the only reason I didn't keep going is 'cause at 4.25%, it just didn't seem worth it. It is a great all-in-one account. I guess if you want a bank that has branches and you live near U.S.

Bank, then maybe it could be a great option if you need to go to a branch and you just want one account at one institution, or maybe you're already using U.S. Bank for other things. Otherwise, I would love to optimize for an account where I'm earning closer to 5% than 4%.

And the last is an account that I think a lot of people on the internet seem to all know about, but almost everyone I talk to in real life has never heard of, and that is the Fidelity Cash Management account. And with this, you get an account that has pretty much everything you need.

Free wires, ATM reimbursements worldwide, joint trust accounts, checkbooks, high transfer limits, all the other things, bill pay, account routing numbers, everything. And all of your cash in the Fidelity Cash Management account earns interest, and you get to choose your core position. Now, as of recording, the only fund that you can choose for the cash management account earns less than 3%.

However, they have announced that on June 15th, 2024, which will be before this episode even comes out, you'll be able to choose SPAXX, which is a Fidelity government money market fund. I'm looking at it right now. It's held mostly in treasury bills, U.S. government repurchase agreements, and agency floating rate securities.

So it's all government-backed. Current yield is about 4.95%, is at least today's seven-day yield. And that change is coming soon. Now, if you have a Fidelity brokerage account, you can already choose SPAXX as your core position. In fact, all of the features that this account has are pretty much neck and neck the same, whether it's a brokerage account or a cash management account, with the only difference that if you are using a brokerage account, you don't get your ATM fees reimbursed unless you have over $250,000 in the account.

And even then, you need to go and request that some special flag be added to your account. What's the downside here? 'Cause this actually seems like it can do everything. The starting ATM limits are about $500, but I've read that you can request an increase. There is no Zelle access, and there are no ability to set up recurring transfers.

Now, they do have electronic funds transfer, which is effectively an ACH push, which means you can get the routing number, account number, and name of someone and set their account up and be able to send payments to them. So if I wanted to pay my au pair every week, she could give me all that information and I could send her money every single week.

However, there is no way to make that recurring. Now, that'd be an easy feature to add. And if they did, they would check every single box on my list. Obviously, they don't have all the features that Mercury created that are a little bit more like business account features for personal accounts.

But again, those weren't requirements for me. But the ability to set up a recurring transfer is really, really important, at least for my use case, because alternatively, it means I need to remember every single week to log into the Fidelity app and spend a couple minutes to send a transfer.

Layer that on 52 weeks. I know I'm gonna forget one week. I know I'm gonna pay her late. She's gonna be disappointed. That's gonna take time. And so that is a big downside that I wish there was a way to solve with the Fidelity account. One other really cool thing is that that core position has, as I mentioned, about 32% in treasuries, which means depending on your state, you might actually get a better after-tax yield because of those US government investments.

One more thing I like is that you can actually buy other positions in money market funds in your account, and Fidelity will sell them in case you need to cover a bill pay, a transfer, maybe made a credit card payment or withdrew money. So that's really cool. And you can actually put them into things that might have better tax advantage for the state you live in.

So like I mentioned earlier, some of these US government money market funds that are entirely in treasuries could earn a seven-day yield of a little over 5%. But if you factor in what is the equivalent yield of something that doesn't have that tax advantage, it could be closer to 6%.

And so obviously that depends on what state you live in. You can't automatically buy those. So when you deposit money into the account, it's not gonna automatically buy those other things. You can't make them your core position, but they will get liquidated. Or you could use them as a savings bucket.

Let's say you had an emergency fund. You could say, I'm just gonna use this and buy a different money market fund and kind of segregate it that way. Now, a few other small downsides is, one, it doesn't matter to me, but I have seen people talk about how the Fidelity accounts monthly statements are more brokerage statements than checking statements, and they can be hard to read.

I think you could probably get used to it, but if that's really important to you, it could be an issue. And then two, Fidelity is still an old school institution. And so I had a few experiences because I recently opened up this account. I opened a brokerage and a cash management account.

I set it all up. I got it all features working. I set up some transfers to see how it worked. And it was pretty great. But when I had to do a few things, I was just reminded at Fidelity being an old school company. So I closed one account.

I didn't even realize I had. And they said, hey, we're gonna mail you a $0 check for this account. Obviously, you don't need to do anything with it, but it's just something we have to do. And then one time when I did close that account, after the fact, someone said, hey, I did forget to get you verified.

So they went through an identity verification process after they closed the account, which just seemed like things were a bit more manual and at human discretion. Whereas in the Mercury account, everything is online. And so everything is protected by two-factor auth and all this stuff, and you're in control.

Fidelity, I did have to call for a lot of these things. And the phone password login situation is so frustrating because they ask you to type in your password using the numbers, like two would be ABC and that kind of thing, which is great if you're the kind of person that has the same password for everything.

But if you have a 20-character string of numbers, uppercase, lowercase, and symbols, remembering that is impossible. And so you're jumping between one password and your phone to dial in the password. And it's so complicated, you end up skipping it. And now you have to go through further verification when a rep answers.

So don't love that. Other thing I do love though, is Fidelity is so active on Reddit. I would challenge you to find a post in the Fidelity subreddit where people aren't asking questions and someone from Fidelity isn't chiming in with an answer that's really thoughtful and helpful. So I love that.

Also, I'll set up allthehacks.com/fidelity to forward to the Fidelity Cash Management account with any offer I can get from them. I'm gonna email and see what happens. So check that out. So that's a lot of accounts. I probably went through at least seven or eight in a lot of detail.

What is the best bank account? I will give you three answers. First, the Wealthfront Cash account. Amazing UI/UX. Great automation that I'll talk about in a second. Consistently high rates. All the features you need of a checking account, except that you can't wire money to third parties unless it's for the purpose of buying a home.

You get no joint access or a joint account and there are no automated recurring transfers. So if you're interested in that, I think it's a great option. It's paying 5% right now. 5.5 if you want a referral link. If you go to allthehacks.com/wfcash, it's a rotation through all of our member referral links.

So all of our members will get an extra half a percent. You'll get an extra half a percent. And obviously if you join the membership, you can add your link to that rotation. I know a few members have pointed out that each referral can extend up to a year for three months each.

So I have a few members who've said they've already bumped up. They're earning an extra half a percent for the next year, which is awesome. Next is Fidelity. Honestly, this account has everything, including some tax advantage and even more tax advantage if you buy other money market funds. The only downside is it's an old school user experience and there's none of those automated recurring transfers, which might be really nuanced to me and might not matter to you, but worth flagging.

The other thing that was really nice is there is the ability to go all in on Fidelity. So there's this post on Bogleheads called the Fidelity One-Stop Shop, where someone points out that you could have the cash management account as your bank account, your brokerage account. You could do a Fidelity 529.

You could put all of your Roth IRAs. You could do your solo 401k, your HSA. And you could even, if you wanted to use the Fidelity credit card, which is 2% cash back on everything. So you could use Fidelity as your simple one-stop shop for absolutely everything financial. And I think if that's important to you, I couldn't imagine a better solution.

And then the last is Mercury. If the idea of having some of these business-like features in your account would simplify your life, being able to send wires on demand online, being able to spin up multiple accounts and multiple cards for other people. I even found that when I was looking at a service called Greenlight, which would allow you to set up a debit card for your kids, that Mercury actually would let me create a login, create a separate checking and savings account for my daughter.

It would all be legally in my name and I could get her a debit card and send it to her. And so she could operate out of it. I could transfer money in and out of it. I could set limits and rules on how she spends on her debit card.

So effectively, I could get all of the features of opening up a Greenlight account. Maybe not all of them. I haven't looked in too much nuance at the details and the features of Greenlight. She'd earn 5% on her savings account though. So that's cool. And I wouldn't have to pay an annual fee for Greenlight.

So there are some features that might even make it more compelling and worth that $240 annual fee. And if they can add joint accounts, which is on the list, they've committed to do it. And if they add that treasury feature, which would let you put money into a fund that hopefully has some tax advantage, I think it would be a really, really compelling alternative to the Fidelity account.

So is it worth it? Really depends on your circumstance. I don't have any invites, but I have asked for them. And if I get them, I'll put them up at allthehacks.com/mercury. So I hope all that was helpful. Now, if you're wondering whether it's really worth switching, I guess it depends a little bit on how much cash you have.

But I would say the average person listening to this episode who's using an account at a regular bank is probably missing out on at least $1,000 a year of interest by using the wrong bank account. If you keep $25,000 in your checking account, missing out on 5% is about $1,250 a year.

Now, keep in mind that this interest is taxed, unlike credit card points or cash back. So that might take you below the $1,000 threshold. Now, maybe $1,000 isn't important to you. Maybe it's super meaningful. I have a feeling that if it's not important, you probably also keep a lot more money in checking account.

So maybe that number will be a lot higher for you. If you do have 50, $100,000, or maybe you're even saving for a down payment, or you're making regular tuition payments, missing out on 5% is gonna be thousands of dollars a year. And even if the alternative isn't zero, but it's 0.48% like you're getting at Schwab, or 0.25% like you're getting at the Ally checking account, it's still close to $1,000 a year.

So to me, that's worth it, especially when some of these products are such a better experience. Last, before I talk about automation, I wanna talk about a few reasons you might not wanna do this. First, if you get a mortgage discount by keeping your checking account at that financial institution, then moving to another one might cost you a lot more in mortgage interest than you'll earn in interest on your account.

Now, you could automate this and use an account that regularly just moves the amount for your mortgage payment into that account and leaves it there. Or you could send a message to your bank and say, "Hey, can I move which account I pay my mortgage out of?" And if that works, great.

Or if you have a bank that has really cool features that make it worth being there even for less interest, that could make sense. All the Hacks member Andy mentioned that his bank will actually adjust down his interest rate if mortgage rates drop for just a couple hundred or thousand dollars, which is really compelling if you're someone who currently is sitting on a 7% interest rate and wants to be able to lower that in the future.

So I can't speak to all the situations. Those are a couple that came to mind. But the last thing I wanna cover is automating your entire financial life. And it's something I actually wanted to do an entire episode on, but I realized with just a few simple moves, you can automate your entire financial life from saving to investing.

So I don't think we need to spend an hour talking about it. And I want is to end you up in a place where you don't have to think about money on a regular basis, and you can have the peace of mind that everything you want is happening in the background.

So here's the way I do it. First, I set all bills up on autopay. That doesn't mean you don't have to review your credit card bills. It just means you don't review them and manually make the payments. So all of them are getting auto paid out of my primary account, the account that's earning interest.

For a couple of bills like our property tax bill that aren't automated, I just set up a calendar reminder so I don't forget, and I pay it out of the same account. So all the bills are getting paid automatically. Because the cash is earning interest, I don't have to worry about moving money around at all.

So what if you don't want everything in cash? What about investing? So there are a few ways to automate this. So assuming you have a brokerage account somewhere, one way is through your payroll provider, you can actually split your direct deposit. So you could say, if I get $1,000 per pay period, I could put 800 in checking and 200 in my brokerage account.

If your brokerage account supports that, that's an option. If not, you could just set up a recurring transfer, say every month, I wanna move $500 from my savings account into my investment account. Now, unfortunately, unless you're using an automated investment platform like Wealthfront or Betterment, where the money deposited gets automatically invested, then once that money's there, you do actually have to think about it.

You have to log in and you have to go in and buy and sell securities, which is more work than I wanna have to think about. That's why I love the Wealthfront product, because I could just send money into the account and it's automatically invested. Now, full disclosure, I worked at Wealthfront.

I do hold some stock in the company, but I also use them for my investing. The other way to do this is to use a feature that I helped build at Wealthfront. When we built it, it was called Autopilot. I think it's called Automated Savings now. And the way it works is you can monitor a cash account or a checking account, and it doesn't even have to be at Wealthfront.

And say, anytime there is more than X number of dollars in that account, I want you to take that money and go through this process. And you create an automated savings plan. And what it will do is you can go in and say, first, I want you to fill my cash account with $20,000 of an emergency fund.

And then once that's full, then I want you to put up to the annual limit into my Roth IRA. After that, I want you to put up to, let's call it $5,000 in my children's 529. And after that, invest in my taxable brokerage account. And you can edit your plan anytime you want.

And it just sweeps money from your checking or cash account into all of those places. So I'm really proud of that product. I think it does exactly what I would want to do to automate my finances. And since a lot of my accounts are at Wealthfront, I can use it in that way.

But if you aren't using Wealthfront for your brokerage account, you can set up recurring transfers and automate that as well. You just have to remember to regularly log in and actually buy the securities so you're not leaving cash in your brokerage account. So I hope this episode helps you save a ton of time and energy.

And for everyone, I hope it helps you earn a lot more interest in your cash and helps you find a great bank account that you can use to operate your life out of. Couple of quick reminders, allthehacks.com/wfcash if you want a referral link to get the extra half a percent.

allthehacks.com/mercury if you want an invite. I can't promise that there will be anything there, but I'm going to try my best. And finally, allthehacks.com/bankbonus. We set up a page here that showcases all of the different bonuses various banks are offering when you open up accounts. So if you are looking for an account to open, whether it's for the bonus or just because you want an account, definitely check that page to see if there's any special promotions to earn a few hundred dollars or even a few thousand dollars when you open up a new account.

And finally, allthehacks.com/fidelity if we can get a special offer for the cash management account, I will put it there. If not, I will just redirect you to the Fidelity site. Links to everything we discussed are in the show notes. If you want to ask questions or go deeper on this episode, consider joining the All The Hacks membership and joining our live call where I'm going to take questions for members.

That's allthehacks.com/join. If you have feedback on this episode or any questions, feel free to leave it down in the comments. I'll do my best to reply. If you want to join the member call where I'm going to go through all of this and take questions live, you can join the All The Hacks membership at allthehacks.com/join.

That's it for this episode. I will see you next time.