Thread by @danielsdesk, I’m devastated that @simple is being closed. It’s been my favorite bank [...]

I’m devastated that @simple is being closed. It’s been my favorite bank for many years now because it did everything I wanted with smart banking and nothing more... I’m going to have to find an alternative that I don’t hate

thanks to everyone who is trying to give me alternatives. I don't think I can accurately convey what I'm looking for in bite size tweets but I guess I'll try:

1) I'm looking for a bank with these tech features. Not an app. Without a bank, you basically have budgeting software. I don't need help finding that. There are lots of those (hell even spreadsheets) but they *don't work* unless they are tied into your financial infrastructure

This means anything that is an app that does budgeting, but has no bank (or even partners with a bank to give you a card) is a dealbreaker for me. Things like Mint never worked for me because they relied on sync'ing from your funding sources and sorting that all out later.

It's not immediate so it *does not work*. Solutions like Simple that partner with a bank are tied to the infra. They give you a card, you use that card, it IMMEDIATELY reflects in your budget. Not later that day. Not 5 mins. INSTANT. I'm not going to wait for sync'ing ever again.

In fact, the only blocker that Simple has to reflecting your budget accurately is YOU. They had this thing called Safe-to-Spend and if your goals budget was larger than your available balance, they asked you to "square up"

This meant looking at your goals and making sure transactions reflected the budgets you put away, otherwise adjust your goal budgets. I liked this in the early product but then they added more things to automate this even more

2) Variety of budgeting. Don't pretend like you solved the problem for me. You don't know how I budget. I don't have a dozen ways of budgeting but I do have at least 1-3 depending on the context of the situation

From associating buckets with merchants, to putting away part of your paycheck automatically, Simple did that. But the most important thing for me was the simplest: envelope budgeting. If the environment is hectic and I need to adjust budgets per pay on the fly, nothing is easier

than saying "I have $100 for groceries. $50 for gas". Put it away and it's not reflected in available balance any more. Spending for those things is as easy as tagging transactions with that goal. So even in the most chaotic times of my life when I couldn't predict automated

expenses perfectly, I still had the ability to do basic envelope budgeting in Simple. And then they added more ways to do goals, automated expenses taken out of paychecks, etc. But I'm not fond of products that give you only one way to handle budgeting. There is no one solution

Not for folks in real life at least. Again, everything that happened in Simple was instant. There was no cognitive load of me having to worry about if the math was right. It was. And 2020 financial chaos proved more to me than ever that Simple had the stuff I needed

3) Ties to savings. It was stupid simple for me to move money to and from available balance -> goals/expenses -> savings *and not regret it*. Sometimes it takes time to do a transfer to the savings and what if the timing for that was wrong and now you need that money back?

If you have to fear sending money to your savings *you won't do it*. It's that simple. I'm a real person with real life problems and if you put too much friction, there is always risk that makes you want to skip saving. But that's not good for our financial health

Making saving trivial and without consequence is important so that people don't make excuses not to put into savings. Simple did that too

4) Shared features between members. My partner also had Simple so instant transfers between us was already a win because we both had goals/expenses in our own accounts. Then Simple took it even farther and created Shared Accounts

which were like a single Simple account, with unified login, goals, and cards for both of us. But we didn't want to use that all the time; there were lots of reasons to keep transactions private so we still had our Personal Simple accounts and it didn't matter

because you had goals and instant transfer everywhere within Simple, regardless of personal or shared account, and debit cards that after being used would immediately reflect in the ecosystem

5) I don't have the cares that other bank customers have. I don't use checks so I don't care that check books weren't a thing. I don't pull out money from ATMs, I have other accounts I can do that with that usually have enough for me to cover that.

I don't care about rewards, I have good credit cards for all of that. There are a lot of other features that prevent me from going to other banks because I'm a different audience demographic. Simple *got* me. All of their improvements and features were for the same thing

Make anything related to managing my money via goals as easy, seamless, and bulletproof as possible. And it worked for YEARS. And now I'm stuck. There's lots more I could say but Twitter is a really terrible platform for explaining anything and this already took too many tweets

But as a summary:
- App + Bank infra
- Reduce cognitive overhead / no mental math / fear of risk or excuses
- GIVE options and trust that your consumer wants to use *your tools* in a way that *works for them* instead of pretending you just solved everything (you haven't)

Anything less than this I won't accept any more. Budgeting works like project management works. Reduce any friction that causes you not to capture, not to trust, not to share, or not to save. Because as soon as someone is able to make excuses about not doing it, they won't

Then adding automation on top of this is just the icing on the cake

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