1y ago

'Cash stuffing' is the budgeting hack gaining popularity on social media. Here's how it works

www.abc.net.au Madison says she'll never use her card full-time again after discovering 'cash stuffing'

As cost-of-living pressures continue to climb, people are looking for creative ways to save. One method gaining popularity on social media is called "cash stuffing". It's a reinvention of the old envelope system our grandparents used to use, and it's bringing back the use of physical cash.

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I've been wondering if there's a way to do this with actual bank accounts. I know with ING I can only have like 2 savings/transactional accounts (1 joint, 1 personal).
I'd like to be able to spin up accounts for these categories and use them as the "envelopes" instead of relying on cash.
- Yes.
  I'm with bank Australia they let me have as many sub accounts as i please, no fees.
  There's savings, bill kitty, rates, honeypot (building a six month expense nest egg separate to savings) car kitty, cat emergencies, house emergencies. Anything left on the main card-accessibile account is groceries and pissing away money. Been running that since the 90's. Works so well husband has been throwing his half in there as well since '07
  
  @Taleya @bmck
  Partner and I have 2 individual accounts where we get our personal money paid in and a main bill paying account that covers everything not related to personal stuff. We both contribute to the main account and pay out from that each fortnight for our "allowances".
  
  https://bankaust.com.au/ ?
  I was looking at their site and could see anything about sub-accounts?
  
  Bankaust, yup. You just slap an online saver or three in there.
- Edit: I wrote the reply before noticing that I was not in a US-centric sub. That's on me. But the general premise of "No, you can't autodebit" or "Sure, I'll let you think you can auto-debit. Doesn't mean I'll have it turned on at that moment" still holds.
  Fidelity does not have an upper limit on the number of cash management accounts one can have. At least not one that I've discovered, as yet.
  I've been doing this for years, but for me it's more about sequestering money away from the card that I actively use. Ever sat there for a couple days and realized just how many times Apple will try to hit your card(s) the same day? Same with Amazon.
  If that card approves, it's because I'm explicitly trying to pay you, not because some company decided they want to be more aggressive with the autopay.
  I don't use Zelle etc for that, when I can help it - look at who runs that service. Yeah, no, not giving you even more data so you can make assumptions about my behavior and intentions.
  In addition, I've found multi-currency cards with the ability to set aside money to be useful in the same way. I absolutely do not have trust or a prior relationship with everyone I'm paying over the course of a month, which means I want more control over that process than I normally get.
  Is it a pain in the ass sometimes? Sure. But it's also annoying to have to unlock cards when I want to use them - doesn't mean that I forego that extra security. The alternative is bad.
  
  But the general premise of “No, you can’t autodebit” or “Sure, I’ll let you think you can auto-debit. Doesn’t mean I’ll have it turned on at that moment” still holds.
  That doesn't hold in Australia. I've never heard of a bank here that allows you to (easily) stop someone from taking money out of your account. In fact, even if the account is empty they might be able to overdraw it if they have the right level of merchant account (I had that happen once, when I booked a flight that was about to depart, and they messed up/failed to charge me for the flight. Three months later someone noticed and my account was charged/overdrawn).
  As someone who runs a business that charges customers money all day every day... if I have the customer's details then I can charge their account whatever I want. Sure, I could go to jail (or be sent out of business) if I do the wrong thing... but there isn't really much protection below that point and if I'm only mildly scummy, I'd probably get away with it.
  
  Here, those charges normally hit our debit cards - not the account itself in the sense that a direct debit skips the card and basically functions like a check/cheque.
  Nothing on the card, it declines, they can't charge.
  We used to use EFT with our ancient transfer system, still do for direct deposit payroll and such, but otherwise it's all cards here. Very few people use account transfers. so none of that is a risk here. It takes two or three business days, and the merchant has zero visibility into whether or not the transaction will actually approve at the time they make the sale. Online merchants wouldn't send items without cleared payment, but very few even use those transfers anymore because there's just no information on whether the customer actually has the money or not.
  In the airline example, they never would have gotten their money unless they were ok with making a very big problem out of it - most companies wouldn't, and most companies would not pursue someone who owed them some nominal amount.
  Credit cards don't work like that here, they approve whether you want them to or not unless they're locked, but debit cards lend themselves to sequestering money like that in multiple accts.

27 comments