sidenote

joined 1 year ago

This is the exact reason I lean into wealth management tools, and likely why more credit cards, brokerage services, etc are starting to offer them as a standard feature. Being able to plug your accounts into a tool that handles all the API horrors for you is such a time save, even if the result is dealing with something admittedly half baked in most cases.

Paycheck goes into checking at credit union, where I have a money market account alongside and a ton of auto transfers. Basically any incidental regular expense I've canceled (useless subscription, payment plan, cigarette habit) gets transferred at the rate it used to be. I've been doing this since middle school and it's up to about $1k/mo.

Other than that, PayPal Cash Back card rewards funnel into a high interest PayPal Savings account. I also transfer whatever is over my emergency fund threshold from the money market account into here. When it gets big enough to roll into a higher yield CD, it goes back to the credit union.

Simple setup but it works. I keep retirement in its own separate world.