-1 for Simple. Not refunding ATM fees is ridiculous for a bank that has no physical ATMs. Also, things like this: "Your Simple Visa® Card will not function on August 6th from 2:00 - 9:00 am EST"
You can see that people are pretty split about Simple being a good idea. I can tell you that the one thing they offer me over any other online bank is their budgeting tools.
I'll specify a certain amount like 500 or 1000 dollars to be set aside by any date. It will move over small amounts daily without you noticing. In reality, the money is all in the same account but mentally I do way better with this scheme. I've built an emergency, a car repair fund, saved for AC for my home, and more without seeing a huge loss in my daily balance. It helped me learn to budget and save and that's the value they provide.
If you already are an amazing budgeter, no need to sign up.
It's a bank startup which doesn't have physical locations. They're partnered with Bancorp, so your account is backed by FDIC, and they have a large number of ATMs. You can read more here https://www.simple.com/
I could say horrible things about them. Like when I was in school and my student loan disbursement came on a Bancorp debit card, and they charged me money to withdraw funds. Yup, if I wanted to buy books with my student loan disbursement, I got charged bank fees on money I got from a loan and paid interest on, and had absolutely no choice in the matter.
Yeah it was my school's decision, but that doesn't excuse Bancorp from offering a product that is designed specifically to cheat people out of their money.
As I understand it, Bancorp is just contracted by Simple to hold the funds and interface with the banking system. All of the policies, support and user-facing parts are handled by Simple itself.
Actually it's the other way around. Simple is the public facing interface that is beholden to all of the policies and inconveniences of Bancorp. Don't get me wrong I love the service but full disclosure it's Bancorp with makeup. Now I have had instances where they where Bancorp was closed for a holiday and my direct deposit didn't get processed and I had bills that were going to hit that I needed access to my funds and they were very helpful and happy to do a temporary credit to my account to make sure that I got what I needed.
I switched to Ally for checking & savings a year ago, and I absolutely love it. Best mobile & web UX I've seen from a bank, best interest rates out there, ATM fee reimbursements, and easy mobile check deposit.
This, plus a pretty unique system for allocating cash around. Perhaps it's psychological, but I've been with them for about 3 months and have started burrowing out of a years-long financial hole in pretty short order.
Basically, imagine the envelope budgeting system as an actual part of your account, combined with a daily savings option. Assuming that you enter your bills in correctly (and it's, erm.. dead simple), you know immediately how much cash you have is safe to spend.
Great CS as well. Actual humans who speak English and who can solve your problems.
Having been a customer of Charles Schwab for several years at this point, I've never seen the appeal of Simple. I get better interest rates, fantastic customer service, unlimited ATM rebates and a host of brokerage services, all for free.
Fellow Schwab customer here. Unlimited ATM rebates has been great. I was surprised at bow nice it felt to whip out my Schwab card next to the scary little free-standing ATM machine at the cash-only shop with some ridiculous $4.00 ATM fee. Felt like a cheat code.
> I get better interest rates, fantastic customer service, unlimited ATM rebates and a host of brokerage services, all for free.
All great points. The customer service in particular is just outstanding. If there was the opposite experience of calling into Comcast support, it'd be calling into Charles Schwab. They know their stuff and are willing and able to patiently explain things well beyond a script. The yearly free financial consult is awesome, too.
Only annoyance is that some of the procedures require printing out a PDF, filling it in, and physically mailing it or faxing it back. Hopefully that'll be less common in the future.
That's interesting, I got an email from them a few months after signing up to be contacted at a Career Fair and they left the {{CLIENT NAME}} placeholder in the email. So I figured they were incompetent :P
Schwab is fantastic. Their service is top-notch and I'm really glad I'm no longer with Chase. I once accidentally rated an online chat interaction lowly, and received a follow up call by a concerned manager less than a day later.
Lots of love happening for Schwab here - but it's more or less the same with Fidelity, Morgan Stanley, etc - ATM rebates for any ATM, no fees, free checking / checkbooks, etc.
A cheat code is a nice way of describing how refreshing this is in comparison with the standard bank business model of offering some fairly limited basic checking account as a loss leader, then constantly trying to upsell you on every other kind of product / account imaginable, trying the overdraft protection scam on you, ATM fees, checkbook fees, etc, etc.
The only issue with Schwab is their ridiculous password policy (8 chars). Turning on 2FA on your account is a must with them (they'll happily send you a little hardware token generating dongle if you ask.)
It took some getting used to, but I've really liked using Simple. I can now very easily always answer the following question: "how much money can I spend right now?"
