In this edition of Stretching Your Dollar, Caleb Silver, editor-in-chief of Investopedia, asked the question: Should you break up with your bank? 



<div class="block">In this edition of Stretching Your Dollar, Caleb Silver, editor-in-chief of Investopedia, asked the question: Should you break up with your bank? </div>

Wake Up With Cheddar

Stretching Your Dollar: Should You Break Up With Your Bank?

Hello. Hello, friends. Welcome back to News. I'm Baker. Now I'm gonna do by now too. Stretching your dollar. It seems like we only pay attention to our bank when something goes wrong. But knowing where your money is and how your accounts work can actually save you big bucks and sometimes it is time to break up with your bank to tell us more. We're joined by Caleb Silver editor in chief of Investor. Caleb. So nice to see you in the studio. So good to be here. So you should first, you should have different accounts at various banks for different purposes. Why is that? You don't have to but you can, and here's a good reason if the bank you're at is not offering you a high yield for a high yield savings account or offering you products like C DS or money market funds right now where you can get between four and 5% you can date other banks and move to another bank. I just did it myself. If you're not getting the kind of service you want from your bank or you can't transfer money between credit cards that you might have at the bank, it's ok to bank at another bank, which I don't want to do is scatter yourself too thin because then you got to keep control of everything. And also if you have a savings account, you want that money to compound, especially if you're getting a high yield of return. If you have it scattered everywhere, that's little pieces compounding instead of the big piece. But make sure that, you know, that $250,000 threshold, that the FDIC insures because we've had some bank failures and you want to make sure your money is protected. Absolutely. Wow. That's really interesting sort of data around here. And let's talk about the importance of closing onus savings and check accounts. And I have an old credit union for my parents that I left, you know, back home. I'm sure there's probably some money still in that thing. I should have had to close. Yeah. Yeah, you gotta out that piggy bank, close those accounts. You don't want open accounts all over the country or all over the world for that matter, try to consolidate your accounts. So, you know, where everything is? Those old accounts aren't doing you any favors. They're not helping with their credit score. Like an old credit card. Might, you want to close those accounts if you're not using them and you might have some interest in there that's built up over those. Yeah. Empty out the piggy bank. You can have thousands of dollars. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Go crazy. So how important is direct deposit? Very important because we wanna automate our banking. Banking should be boring. Banking should be simple. We want it to be very personal. So get that direct deposit instead of waiting for the check, then you gotta go to the bank, you gotta wait for the check to clear. It's so easy to have direct deposit and if you have direct deposit, then it's really easy to get that money into your checking account and automatically put them away into savings. Automatically put some way into your investing account, make it automatic. So you're not thinking about it, make sure you pay yourself. Oh yeah, I the anxiety of having like the check in my pocket and having to take it to the bank was always crazy for me. Let's talk about credit cards here, Caleb uh and is it ok to have multiple different credit cards or instead of maybe just one? Yeah, it's ok but again, you have to be paying attention to the credit cards. You have the interest rates you have on those credit cards, A P Y s on credit cards at a record high right now. And you want to make sure you're paying off those balances. So a lot of people balance credit card to credit card to keep ahead of the times. That's not a good way to live your financial life. If you have a few, make sure you're paying the balance, make sure you know, that date make that automatic as well. That auto pay and make sure you're aware of those interest rates because those float along with federal funds rates. Let's talk about bank fees. How do you avoid them? Yeah. Well, first of all, you got to go through your statement to see if they're charging you any fees at all. A lot of banks may charge you if you don't have a certain balance of limit of $5000 or more. So you wanna make sure you're not getting that $15 charge every month. You want to see what the charges are. If any for transferring funds between accounts at the same bank, you shouldn't have to pay a fee for that. And if you're a banking customer with a lot of money in the bank, a gold customer at some banks, those transfer fees, those wires are free. You wanna make sure that you're not paying any unnecessarily. Uh Caleb Silver uh editor in chief over invested, giving us all the good knowledge as always. Thank you so much, Caleb.