vania-janet/multiturn-rag-retrieval-data huggingface dataset:
There are very few banks which offer two-factor authentication.  Part of the reason is cost.  Providing a token to every account-holder is expensive, not just in the device or system, but in providing support and assistance to the millions of people who won't have the faintest idea how it works and complain that they no longer have access to their accounts. That said, it is sometimes available on request for personal accounts and many banks require it for their business clients. My HSBC Business account comes with two-factor as default and it works extremely well. There is also the pseudo-two-factor security offered by Visa and MasterCard (3-D secure) which performs a similar function.
My small business has developed a relationship with a larger branch of a regional bank. I generally work on site or at home,  so when I need a space for interviews etc. I just call the bank and reserve the meeting room there.
In some cities, there might even be ""free"" tax preparation services by certain organizations that want to help the community and these are often available even to small businesses. In general, income taxes can be complicated and the rules are always changing. I've found that most small business owners that try to file their own taxes generally end up paying a lot more taxes than they're required to, in essence, they are overpaying! Running a business (and making a profit) can be hard enough, so on to of that, you don't need to be paying more than you are required to! Also, I am going to assume that since it sounds like it would be a business of one (you), that you won't have a Payroll. That is another area that can be complicated for sure. Ok, with those generics out of the way, let me tackle your questions related to starting and operating a business, since you have the ""idea for your business"" pretty figured out. Will you have to pay any substantial amount of money to attorneys or advisors or accountants or to register with the government? Not necessarily. Since the rules for operating a business legally vary by your operating location (where you will be providing the service or performing your work), you can certainly research this on your own. It might take a little time, but it's doable if you stick with it. Some resources: The state of Florida (where I live) has an excellent page at: http://www.myflorida.com/taxonomy/business/starting%20a%20business%20in%20florida/ You might not be in Florida, but almost every state will have something similar. What all do I need to do to remain on the right side of the law and the smart side of business? All of the answers above still apply to this question, but here are a few more items to consider: You will want to keep good records of all expenses directly related to the business. If you license some content (stock images) for example, you'll want to document receipts. These are easy usually as you know ""directly"".
ING Direct does this. Also, have you heard of Mvelopes?  It's a subscription-based service, but it's pretty simple to use, and it lets you have as many envelopes as you want.  You're not limited to five.
I just set up an account with Scottrade bank (affiliated with the stock trading company).  I get free checking, free checks, and automatic reimbursement for all ATM fees up to 10 withdrawals per month.  Beat that, Bane of America!
Unfortunately I do not have much experience with European banks. However, I do know of ways to earn interest on bank accounts. CDs (Certificates of Deposit) are a good way to earn interest. Its basically a savings account that you cannot touch for a fixed rate of time. You can set it from an average of 6 months to 12 months. You can pull the money out early if there is an emergency as well. I would also look into different types of bank accounts. If you go with an account other than a free one, the interest rate will be higher and as long as you have the minimum amount required you should not be charged. Hope I was able to help!
"I use the (gratis, libre) command-line program ledger for my personal accounts.  It handles funds across accounts gracefully, through a feature called ""Virtual Accounts"".  A transaction can add or subtract money from a virtual account, which need not balance with all the other entries in the transaction.  Then it's just a matter of setting up reports to include or exclude these accounts."
The account doesn't have to be associated with a specific health plan. There are some accounts that work that way. In fact, mine does. But I didn't go to a bank and open it up, it came as a package deal with my employer's health plan. Furthermore I don't contribute to it, the company does. If I wish to contribute my own funds, I have a separate Flexible Spending Account (FSA). This is not tied to my health plan. I can make qualified purchases at Wal Mart, Target, or wherever I choose. Then I can submit the receipts for reimbursement.  In your case it sounds like your HSA works more like my FSA. The relevant question here is 'How do I (you) withdraw funds from the HSA?' There are a few different possibilities. Some accounts have a debit card, some give you checks, some have a reimbursement process similar to my FSA. (Some have more than one option available.) In your case you should contact Bank of America to determine how to withdraw funds from your account.
The best way to answer this question is to try. GnuCash is free, so setting it up and giving it a go shouldn't be too hard. After all, what really matters is how helpful the program is for your purposes. One aspect of personal finance that stops me from jumping to GnuCash/KMyMoney/MoneyDance is the ability to download transactions from my financial institutions. Last time I checked, the process was somewhat involved and support was limited for a handful of banks. Because of that, I decided to stick with MS Money (and once Microsoft dropped the ball, with Quicken). I am sure things are better these days, but I am still not comfortable with trusting my finances to something new and unproven. I still remember how painful it was several years ago, when some bug in MS Money caused occasional mess-up of the reconciliation state for the American Express credit cards.
I'm just a sole trader who doesn't have much money which is why I'm looking at budget stuff.  It's not like I'm a big business just being really tight.   I need advice on this, not to get down-voted.  I need one that is cheap or free but I would prefer that I can upload my own files and I would like to connect my own domain to it.
"If you are using software like QuickBooks (or even just using spreadsheets or tracking this without software) use two Equity accounts, something like ""Capital Contributions"" and ""Capital Distributions"" When you write a personal check to the company, the money goes into the company's checking account and also increases the Capital Contribution account in accordance with double-entry accounting practices. When the company has enough retained earnings to pay you back, you use the Capital Distributions equity account and just write yourself a check. You can also make general journal entries every year to zero out or balance your two capital accounts with Retained Earnings, which (I think) is an automatically generated Equity account in QuickBooks. If this sounds too complex, you could also just use a single ""Capital Contributions and Distributions"" equity account for your contributions and distributions."
"Let's divide all bank accounts into savings and checking. The main difference is that checking is easy to get money from; savings is hard to get money from. Because of this, the federal Reserve requires that banks keep more money on hand to cover transactions in checking accounts. Here is a related question from a banking customer regarding a recent notice on their bank statement: Deposit Reclassification. It seems that the bank was moving the customer's money between hidden sub accounts to make it look like the checking account was really a savings account and thus ""reduce the amount of funds we are required to keep on deposit at the Federal Reserve Bank."" If they didn't have to transfer the money many times the bank could keep less cash on hand. But once they did 5 hidden transactions the rest of the money in the hidden savings account would be moved by the bank. The 6 transaction limit is done to not allow you to treat savings like checking. Here is a relevant quote from the Federal Reserve Savings Deposits Savings deposits generally have no specified maturity period. They may be interest-bearing, with interest computed or paid daily, weekly, quarterly, or on any other basis. The two most significant features of savings deposits are the ‘‘reservation of right’’ requirement and the restrictions on the number of ‘‘convenient’’ transfers or withdrawals that may be made per month (or per statement cycle of at least four weeks) from the account. In order to classify an account as a ‘‘savings deposit,’’ the institution must in its account agreement with the customer reserve the right at any time to require seven days’ advance written notice of an intended withdrawal. In practice, this right is never exercised, but the institution must nevertheless reserve that right in the account agreement. In addition, for an account to be classified as a ‘‘savings deposit,’’ the depositor may make no more than six ‘‘convenient’’ transfers or withdrawals per month from the account.
If a bank that was short of money suddenly stopped making loans, it'd be screwed: no new loans = no way to make money to pay back depositors and also keep the lights on = no more bank. And the story is believable because of the way banks make so little effort to solicit commercial deposit business. Oh sure, they used to give you a free toaster if you opened an account; but now it's really quite challenging to find a no-fee checking account that doesn't impose a super-high deposit limit. And the interest paid on savings deposits is asymptotically approaching zero. If banks actually needed your deposits, they'd be making a lot more of effort to get them. I mean, they won't turn up their noses; your deposited allowance is a couple basis points cheaper to the bank than borrowing from the Fed; but banks seem to value small-potatoes depositors more as a source of fees and sales opportunities for services and consumer credit than as a source of cash. (It's a bit different if you get north of seven figures, but smaller depositors aren't really worth the hassle just for their cash.) This is where someone will mention the regulatory requirements of fractional reserve banking: banks are obliged by regulators to keep enough cash on hand to pay out a certain percentage of deposits. Note nothing about loans was said in that statement: this requirement does not serve as a check on the bank making bad loans, because the bank is ultimately liable to all its depositors for the full value of their deposits; it's more making sure they have enough liquidity to prevent bank runs, the self-fulfilling prophecy in which an undercapitalized bank could be forced into bankruptcy. As you noted in your question, banks can always borrow from the Fed at the Fed Discount Rate (or from other banks at the interbank overnight rate, which is a little lower) to meet this requirement. They do have to pledge collateral, but loans themselves are collateral, so this doesn't present much of a problem. In terms of paying off depositors if the bank should collapse (and minimizing the amount of FDIC insurance payout from the government), it's really capital requirements that are actually important.
The bank now has $2,100,000 in deposits, $1,000,965 in cash, $1,099,868 in loans, and $833 in profit. The bank is taking in $10,615 per month ($965 x 11) in loan payments, making profit of $9,163 ($833 x 11) per month from interest. This process of loans and deposits and payments can go on forever without any outside influence. This is the primary way money is created. It's like printing money without the paper. Of course, we're not in a closed system. Banks are limited in endlessly creating money, primarily by two things: Reserve Requirements are set by government agencies. They might say banks can lend until their cash on hand (or liquid equivalent) is, at minimum, 35% of total deposits. So a bank with $1,000,000 in deposits would have to keep $350,000 in cash at any given time. Capital Requirements work largely the same way. It's more the bank saying, ""What happens if a bunch of people want their deposits back?"" They plan a reasonable amount of cash to have on hand for that scenario."
Banks in the US have to report deposits of more than $10,000, so they'll contact you to complete form 8300 or something. It should not be a problem, though, if you specify that it's someone else's money, not your income.
"Current is another word for Checking, as it is called in the US. Savings account is an interest-bearing account with certain limitations. For example, in the US you cannot withdraw money from it more than 6 times a month. Here is the explanation why. Current account is a ""general-use"" account on which you can write checks, use ATM/Debit cards and have unlimited transactions. It can also have negative balance (if your bank agrees to let you overdraft, they usually charge huge fees for that though). Checking accounts can have interest as well, but they usually don't, and if they do - it's much lower than the savings account interest."
"Thanks for the reply man. Yeah it literally says ""closed"" next to the accou t name. But we finally got ahold of someone, I guess they close your account whenever you have $0 in it and the account should open again 1-2 business days after the direct deposit tries to go into her account. At least that's what the lady said.   She hates this bank but we live in a small town and there's just not many options in terms of banking here.  Thanks for the help though man I appreciate it!"
&gt; checking account normal?  Not really, only if you have a small account.  It usually works that you get a monthly fee if you have under a certain amount of money in the account.  So normal for poor people who the banks don't want to deal with.  Not normal for people who have some money.
"If you just had one expense once a year of $1200, you would put in $100 a month. The average balance is going to be $600 in that case - the 0 and $1200 months average to $600, as do the $100 and $1100, the $200 and $1000, and so on. If you had one expense twice a year of $600 and put in $100 per month it will average to $300. You have a mix of 3/6/12 months - does 8 months seem reasonable as an ""average"" frequency? If so, there should be about a 4 month slush all the time. Now instead of one expense averaged over 12 months, imagine 12 accounts, each needing $100 a month. If you started at zero, you would put in $1200 the first month and immediately spend it. One account would go from +100 (its share of what you put in) to -1100 while the rest are all at +100. Overall your balance would be zero. Then the next month you would again deposit 1200 and spend 1200, bringing one account to -1000, one to -1100, and the rest to +200. You average to zero actually on deposit because some of the ""accounts"" have negative balances and some have positive. But aren't doing that. You ""caught up"" the months you were  behind. So it would be like putting in $1200 for the first account, $1100 for the second, $1000 for the third and so on - a total of $7800. Then you take out $1200 and go down to 6600. The next month you put in $1200 and take out $1200 but you will always have that $6600 amount in there. All of the accounts will have positive balances - averaging $550 in this example."
"As is so often the case, there is an asterisk next to that 2.5% interest offer.  It leads you to a footnote which says: Savings Interest Rate Offer of 2.5% is available between January 1, 2015 and March 31, 2015 on all net new deposits made between January 1, 2015 and March 31, 2015 to a maximum of $250,000.00 per Account registration. You only earn 2.5% interest on deposits made during those three months.  Also, on the full offer info page, it says: During the Offer Period, the Bank will calculate Additional Interest on eligible net new deposits and: All interest payments are ineligible for the purposes of calculating Additional Interest and will not be calculated for the purposes of determining eligible daily balances. In other words, any interest paid into an Applicable Account, including Additional Interest, will not be treated as a new deposit for subsequently calculating Additional Interest payments. I couldn't totally parse out all the details of the offer from their legalese, but what it sounds like is you will earn 2.5% interest on money that you deposit into the account during those three months.  Any interest you accrue during that time will not count as a deposit in this sense, and so will not earn 2.5% compounded returns.  The ""During the Offer Period"" qualification also makes it sound like this extra interest will only be paid during the three months (presumably at a 2.5% annualized rate, but I can't see where it actually says this). So essentially you are getting a one-time bonus for making deposits during a specific three-month period.  The account doesn't really earn 2.5% interest in the normal sense.  The long-term interest rate will be what it normally is for their savings accounts, which this page says is 1.05%."
If you don't have a bank account then open one and use the check as your opening deposit.  You'll need to obtain a Social Security card as well (you didn't indicate you have one or not, so I'll assume you don't), but they're free and quick to apply for.   I assume you're from Washington state, so there should be no problem with you opening an account in Washington, no matter where the check is from.  Because of the amount of the check, the bank will probably only let yo have a part of the amount for a few days until it clears, but federal banking rules require quick clearance of out-of-state checks (I think it's 48 hours now), so you'd have access to at least half of the money right away and the rest in a few days.
A checking account is one that permits the account holder to write demand drafts (checks), which can be given to other people as payment and processed by the banks to transfer those funds. (Think of a check as a non-electronic equivalent of a debit card transaction, if that makes more sense to you.) Outside of the ability to write checks, and the slightly lower interest rate usually offered to trade off against that convenience, there really is no significant difference between savings and checking accounts.  The software needs to be designed to handle checking accounts if it's to be sold in the US, since many of us do still use checks for some transactions. Adding support for other currencies doesn't change that. If you don't need the ability to track which checks have or haven't been fully processed, I'd suggest that you either simply ignore the checking account feature, or use this category separation in whatever manner makes sense for the way you want to manage your money.
Basically the balance you see in your account is the amount of money you currently have a right to (based on the fact that you have deposited it with the bank) you can of course take this money out pretty well whenever you like or move it however you like. However your bank account is not physical money, the currency you deposite is warehoused and used as the bank sees fit, your account is simply a statement keeping track of how much money the bank is holding for you.   The banks ability to use deposited funds to make money relies on the fundamental assumption that not everyone is going to withdraw all of there deposited funds at once. All banks will have legislated liquidity requirements (how much money needs to be kept in cash or near cash securities (short term interest bearing paper basically) in order to allow for pretty much any reasonable number of people to withdraw any amount of money.Additionally the bank as you said makes money on its loans, securities trading and investment banking activities, that money belongs to the bank and gives them even more money to play around with.  Obviously there have historically been instances in which bank runs occur (everyone tries to withdraw all there money at once, bank dosent acctually have enough liquid assets to pay) or cases in which a bank experiences solvency issues for other reasons (having to pay out poorly thought out speculative securities transactions RE north american housing crash in 2008) in these cases there are consumer protection agencies that insure financial institutions against insolvency (varies by country) But under most normal circumstances the bank uses some portion of deposited funds to make money and has systems in place to ensure an individual person can access there deposited funds as needed.   TLDR: account statement just shows how much money you have given the bank and can thus claim back from them (in the form of withdraw) bank has legally dictated cash reserve percentage to allow for everyone to withdraw money when they need it under most normal circumstances.
I think the issue here is you're starting with a criteria that doesn't actually exist in reality.  A very small amount of research will uncover a plethora of options for savings accounts that pay far more interest than your basic checking account and don't require you to spend on the balance to earn the interest.   The point of saving is to have a pot of money that you can dip in to when you need it, or when you're ready to spend it for it's intended purpose.  That pot of money is not supposed to experience a lot of transactions.  It shouldn't be commingled with funds that come and go on a daily basis.  It doesn't make sense to have checks or a debit card attached to your savings account, because you shouldn't need access to that money that way; not to mention that those two things open the door to fraud on the money that's supposed to be there for you when you need it. Could you put your savings funds in to a checking account, sure.  If we lived in a world where savings accounts that don't force you to jump through hoops to avoid fees didn't pay 10x more interest than interest bearing checking accounts that have similar ease of administration, more people may choose to house savings funds in checking accounts; but that's not the world we live in.   Thanks to the back and forth in the comments below I'm now more certain of my position that if you want a high yielding checking account you'll have pay fees or initiate a certain number of debit card transactions, or both.  No one wants fees, and you shouldn't be spending on your savings in order to earn interest on the balance. It is very easy to juice your savings account to the best rates available.
"As RonJohn points out, direct deposit is something very different.  What's going on here is that they are trying to exclude the ""customers"" that open the account simply for the premium and then close it again as soon as the terms of the offer have been met.  Most people have only one regular source of direct deposit money, either their paycheck or a retirement check.  This acts to make it hard for them to simply take the offer and run."
You don't mention how much money you are talking about but one option is to use reward checking accounts that are FDIC/NCUA insured. They pay 3-4% interest but generally have a few requirements such as 10-12 debit card transactions and sometimes require direct deposit as well as a limit of 10-50k deposits earning the top rate.