A Second Checking Account; Over-Draft Protection Option

Posted by ECOKID on Jul 17th, 2009 | no comments home title

ChaChing! That wonderful direct deposit just came in, its payday! Oh no, now its time to see where its all going to go and whether I’m going to have some left over after bills are fully paid. Recently, after, getting paid two weeks ago, I managed to spend a little more money then I had disposable for expenditures. I ended up over-drafting my account. Even though I managed to get the over-draft fee reversed, I still felt pretty bad about not knowing how much I had in the bank.

Anyways, its pay day, I’ve got all this money and now I have to figure out where it goes and make sure that I don’t over spend while bills are being paid. There has to be a better way to handle this right? After some thought, I decided that it would be an excellent idea to get a second checking account. One strictly devoted to my leisure spending and one strictly for bill paying. So that’s what I did and it has been working out really well. Bill pay takes most of the money needed monthly from my bill pay checking account. Every time payday comes along I make sure that I keep enough in my bill pay account to cover all my bills including rent.

I wondered, how many folks have gone through this same issue before? Was it a unique thing or was this something of a problem for most folks? Shortly after the whole over-draft fee deal I took a look at possibly using automated debits to cover bills. Man, what a good move! If you are looking to manage your money better, I think this would be an excellent little way to keep different monies, used for different things, separated and organized.

At first I was afraid of having automated payments taken from my account because I was afraid of not having sufficient funds to cover the bills and possibly getting an over-draft fee because of it. The cool thing was that as I started looking at all my bills I realized how all my monthly bills always reached a cap at a particular number and so I decided to open the second checking account for my personal spending and left my main account open for paying bills. It was the best thing I’ve done with my accounts.

EcoKid