Having recently been sent off on my own financially, as well as own my own living (in Dallas), it was time to form my own personal banking setup. This is exactly what I have done and I want to share with you what decision I have made and why. I have opened 1 checking account along with 2 savings accounts to form the foundation of my financial life.

Checking Account

Choosing a checking account is, in my opinion, the most important decision. It is essentially the gateway to all of your finances. It should be linked to all of your savings and investments, which are inflows, and then also linked to your bills as outflows. Either way, all of your money flows through it. With that in mind, I set up some criteria to choose a checking account:

1. Has to have physical branches
2. The branches and ATM’s must be conveniently nearby to me
3. The bank should be a national if not international chain
4. It should have an in house investment division

After considering the options (and according to my girl friend, doing quite a bit of irritating middle of the night research) I have decided to go with Chase. Now I can hear people screaming, “they hardly offer any interest at all!” But if I were interested in interest rates, I would have obviously gone with ETrade or some other kind of online banking company. However, I don’t plan on keeping a significant amount of money in the account at any one time. Like I said before, it is a gateway. There will only be enough to pay what I need to pay. When you add the fact that I like the convenience and customer service of brick and mortar locations, it becomes much more obvious why I chose it.

Savings Accounts

The first savings account I opened was a Chase money market account. The reason I chose to do this is so that I had an in house solution to draw from in case I accidentally overdrew my checking; Those fees hurt a lot more than the laughable interest rate. However, I only plan on keeping $500 or so in this account.

The second savings account I went for was an online solution: Savings Square. Now to be frank, the choice of your online savings account isn’t always that important. They all offer variable rates that are roughly the same (currently around 3%). I chose this one, basically because I thought their logo was great. All you should look out for is a FDIC insured guarantee and you should be set. The cherry on top is of course, unlimited transfers and a really high monthly dollar amount transfer limit.

So there you have it! My financial foundation is in place! It is time to start building a fortune (even if it seems like right now things are only getting smaller; I suppose landing a job will alleviate that situation). What does your foundation look like? Does it need a bit of a remodeling?