I love SmartyPig!

I have been trying different ways to manage our sinking funds - money that is not used every month, but is still needed at random times throughout the year for specific things.  We started out with 1 savings account and I just kept track of how much money was set aside for each category in an excel spreadsheet.  That worked okay, but I was constantly having to manually update it and that just took too much time, in my opinion.  So, I have finally found the answer to our sinking fund storage problem...

SmartyPig! 

Essentially, it is just an online savings account.  What is so great about it?  Everything!!!  There are no fees, the minimum amount to open an account is $25, you can open as many accounts as you want (one for each sinking fund perhaps?), it is connected to your bank so transfers are easy, you can get your cash out or get gift cards instead and actually make more money that way, and you can connect it to facebook -if you choose- and your friends can see your goals, see how far away you are from reaching your goals, and even add money to it from their computer.  For example, we have a Smarty Pig savings account open for our son that his birthday and Christmas money is going in, when we make the deposit a message shows up on my facebook page saying that we have "added money to Williamss savings account" with a button that allows anybody who sees that comment to add money to it too.  It is brilliant!

I now have separate accounts for Christmas, Misc. gifts, Chris' music projects, hair-cuts/clothes, car maintenance, and home maintenance.  No more spreadsheets and keeping track.  If there is not money in the account for clothes, we don't buy new clothes.  It makes it so easy for us.  Speeking of easy, I have it set up for every pay day for certain amounts to be auto-deposited in to each account.  It is completely hands off until I need the money, which is great for a busy mom/wife/student/full-time employee like me. 

Thank you SmartyPig.

ps.  What prompted me to find a better way then just stashing all of our savings in one account was not the excel spreadsheet mess (although not having to do that is a huge bonus), but really it was looking at our account one day and noticing a fee for moving money from our savings account to our checking account.  I should not have to pay a fee to spend my money and neither should you.