vania-janet/multiturn-rag-retrieval-data huggingface dataset:
Many good points have been brought up, and I'll just link to them here, for ease. Source: I work at a credit/debit card transaction processing company on the Database and Processing Software teams. See mhoran_psprep's answer. See Chris' answer. Believe it or not, banks don't expose their primary (or secondary) database to end users. They don't expose their fastest / most robust database to end users. By only storing x days of data in that customer-facing database and limiting the range of any one query, any query run against it is much less likely to cause system-wide slowness. They most definitely have database archives which are kept offline, and most definitely have an employee-facing database which allows employees to query larger ranges of data. What would a bank have to gain by allowing you to query a full year of transactions?
Agreed. I use online banking for everything I can. The only thing that holds me back is when there are insane fees on using online payments. So really it's the companies with these fees that are slowing us all down... And the older generation that refuses to try to understand debit/credit cards and online banking. My grandma will only use cash and checks.
There were several incidences of cash shortages in the Danish system recently. On particular saturdays when the streets were bloated with shoppers, you could see the queues for the ATMs stretching for 40-50 yards, and people shaking their heads about why their cards didnt work in the shops.  They have a separate national system to visa called Dankort which everyone is very proud of. But it is curiously prone to failures from time to time. Large cash transactions (over 10,000 DKK) are monitored and questioned verbally when withdrawn or deposited in banks. Interesting also how Danish banks are the most heavily leveraged in Europe...
I'll probably be downvoted to hell for saying this, but why is it considered so normal that so many people are overdrafting their account all the time?  Whether you're poor or rich, there are a plethora of free tools out there to help you manage and keep track of money.  Wells Fargo is doing shady shit here, but if you spend 14 seconds watching your money every day (so you know what your buffer is), they would never be able to do this.  Pay fucking attention to your money and you'll lose a lot less of it (in all areas of life).
The David, and others, claim that ""studies prove those using cards spend 10-15% more than cash buyers."" This is a proven fact from scientific studies. Only they don't exist. The best I've seen proves that college kids given a $20 bill spend more carefully than those given a $20 credit card. This doesn't extrapolate to a family budget, and never will. But that quote has a way of being repeated as fact. Yes, it's non-sense, thank you for reading and quoting my blog, I recognize the quote. The report also shows accounts that have gone to collection. An electric bill isn't a regularly reported item, it's assumed your lights are on. But if you stop paying the bill and they send your account to a collection agency, you'll see it hit your report. In response to the comment below - Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied article titled Monopoly Money: The Effect of Payment Coupling and Form on Spending Behavior runs 13 pages but on the first page offers ""Do consumers spend differently when using one payment mode relative to another mode? For example, do consumers spend more when they receive $50 in the form of a gift card than in the form of cash? If indeed they do, then why? This research addresses these issues."" $50? A $50 gift card is a nuisance, I try to use it up within hours of getting one. As I stated above, the behavior of a person with such a card doesn't scale to a many-thousand-per-month budget. Such articles, in my opinion, are nonsense, proving nothing. Unfortunately, this is a bit of a tangent to the original question, and if I put up a stand-alone ""Is it a fact that people spend more if using a card than cash?"" the question would result in being closed as one that's seeking opinions, not facts."
Banks and credit unions are constantly required to improve their detection methods for suspicious transactions.  It's not just big transactions anymore, it's scattered little ones, etc. Our credit union had to buy software that runs through transactions sniffing for suspicious patterns.  More regulations and more costs that ultimately get passed on to customers in one way or another. Some of your transactions probably tripped a wire where there was none before.
"While I know some people prefer handling things more ""manually"", I really like automating everything possible. To the greatest extent possible, my deposits automatically go into my Checking account and my bills automatically withdraw from it. That way, I never have to worry about accidentally paying a bill late, and my financial life just runs mostly on its own. There are a couple things to be wary of when automating one's financial life:"
You need to run a virus scan on your computers to make sure you do not have a key-logger program running on either.  I would also think about designating one old computer to only access your bank accounts and not do anything but that.   If your computer is infected then every time you login your credit cards can be compromised.
One thing I didn't see mentioned - my major bills are all electronic transfer, i.e. there is no check mailed. A bill due in 2 days can be set up now, and still paid the day after tomorrow. Try that with a check. There are smaller companies that are not done that way and a check mailed, but you state the due date not the mailing date. So the bank still has the obligation to get it there. This is how my particular bank works.
The other answers touch on why having two-factor auth or some other additional system is not worth it compared to simple reactive systems (cancelling lost cards, reversing fraudulent charges etc), but it should also be noted that this goal can be achieved with a method similar to what you describe.  My bank (TD Canada Trust) has an app (I'm on android) that gives you a notification immediately after your card is charged (even test charges like at the gas station).  It's really simple, does not slow down authorization, and makes fraud detection super easy.  (I'm sure some other banks have similar apps).
Guard against fraud and identity theft:- One of the most important things you can do as you plan your trip is to let your bank know that you’ll be abroad. Include exact countries and dates, when possible, to avoid having your card flagged for fraud. Unfortunately, incidents may still arise despite providing ample warning to your bank. Bring a backup credit card or debit card so you can still access some sort of money in case one is canceled. Passports are also critical — not just for traveling from place to place, but also as identification to open a bank account and for everyday purposes. You’ll want to make two photocopies and give one to a friend or family member to keep at home and put the other in a separate, secure location, just in case your actual passport is lost or stolen."
Margin accounts do not have the problem you are imagining, which is unique to cash accounts
Cash-back also lets the store turn hard currency into an electronic transfer or check, which reduces the hassle/risk of hauling bagfulls of cash to the bank. (The smaller stores I've spoken to have called this out as a major advantage of plastic over either cash or checks. I'm assuming that the problem scales with number and size of transactions.)
Easy... Use cash, or keep a ledger.
The US (in fact the global) banking industry is subject to Anti-Money Laundering & Counter-Terrorism funding laws, slowing down funds transfer eliminates a great deal of fraud.
The one those investors said 'hey instead of pricing Tesla 10 years out, we will pool in and create jobs, by founding a $5b bank with locations nationwide'.  I use them because they give great rates at places I shop. Such as if I buy a new tv from that new company founded by that hedge fund that pulled out of netflixes 10 year pricing and started an electronics firm I save 25%!!
You might check out Thrive. They're almost a carbon copy of Mint from the last I checked, but with some additional and (I think) more useful metrics. For instance, they seemed to help more to plan for future expenses in addition to keeping tabs on individual budgets the way Mint does. Everything is automated in the same way as Mint, though I'm not sure their breadth is as far-reaching now since Mint was bought out by Intuit. Nevertheless, whenever I've had a question on Thrive, I shoot it to the devs and I get a very personal and courteous response within the day. So it depends on what you're looking for: Mint can almost guarantee any US bank will be accessible through their site, however Thrive will work much harder to gain your favor.
Option 3 is a pretty unique offering. Nationwide offer free withdrawals abroad, but you need to pay £10 per month (you do get very good travel insurance and other services for that fee too). So I like option 3, good for the average tourist, then pay a nominal % as expected.
I've used ING and have no complaints with them, but right now if you can work with their restrictions, SmartyPig.com has a better rate than ING and better than any listed on SavingsAccount.com.
I have been using http://moneydance.com/ for several years now.  Works pretty well for me. Another one is http://www.iggsoftware.com/ibank/ I have not used it other than a five minute play session.  Looks more mac-ish than Moneydance, but that's all I know.
Their messaging always weirded me out.   They keep talking about you not needing a bank, but have no checking savings. Probably because it's low margin. They stick to student loans, mortgages from rich parts of the market for low risk. They tranche them just like old housing mortgages, but I wonder if there are enough high quality customers out there to satisfy the demand of their investors.
They are pretty good. But for better rates, shop around. I'd suggest Ally or Alliant Credit Union.
"In personal finance, most of your success is determined by personal habit rather than financial savvy.  Getting in the habit of making regular deposits to your savings account will have a much larger effect on your situation than worrying about which account pays the highest interest rate (particularly as neither one of them matches the current inflation rate, which is over 3%). So go ahead and put your money in a savings account, but not because of the interest or safety, but because it's a ""savings"" account."
"The ""Yield Pledge"" looks like a marketing promise to me. It may well be true, but I'm not sure it's useful. As you say, it's currently not the best account out there. If those extra $24 per $10000 are really important to you, why not do your own analysis? Put the money in the highest interest account you can find, and then every three months survey the accounts available and, if it isn't still the highest, transfer the funds to the one that is. Personally I wouldn't put that much effort in for $24, but you may be different."
Now, if you're still intrested, Mint.com works also for Canadian banks. Mint Canada
"Small community banks are absolutely vital to our economy. Plenty of people these days talk about ""buying local,"" but you never hear them talking about banking local. My friends, for the most part, lean left of center politically, so they constantly complain about Wal-Mart and other large brick and mortar chains, but when I called them out on their banking by asking them to pull out their debit cards, they all banked with larger banks; Chase, PNC, Key; the only person (beside myself) who didn't bank with a large national/multi - national bank uses Huntington, which is still a very large regional bank with over $100 billion in assets. They said they didn't want to have to pay ATM fees, to which I responded that many community banks will reimburse the customer for those fees up to a certain amount (like my bank does.) They just shrugged and said they liked the convenience of it, so I asked them why do they think people shop at Wal-Mart? I didn't really get a good answer to that; they just said ""it's different.""  The best way to invest in your community is to bank with a local community bank. Those mom and pop shops you love so much; the plumber who lives down the street; the micro brewery that just opened up all do their banking with the local community bank."
Because you have one major bank saying they don't want to be involved with bitcoin, and another saying that they may go deeper in to it. It's interesting just because of the contrast of the two.  Personally, I suspect there's a lot of low hanging fruit in cryptocurrency trading, especially given that most people in on cryptos seem to be retail individuals like ourselves, and probably relatively unsophisticated.
I think the key thing is flexibility - the money is not tied in with the offset mortgage. If you find a better investment, you can always take some of it out and put it towards that instead. Once it matures, if there is nothing good to reinvest in, then it can go back into the offset mortgage. Once you have had money in the offset account, even if you take it out, you have already (irreversibly) saved money on your mortgage. Right now you would be pressed to find an instant access ISA with a rate higher than 1.5%, so if you need immediate access, then the offset account seems good. On the other hand, for retirement, you might be saving longer term, and then you can get an ISA rate of 3%, currently, which may be better for a part of the money (or perhaps the upcoming Lifetime ISA with 25% yearly bonus may make sense for part of the money), if you do not need easy access to all of it. As Dilip says, this assumes you want safe investments.
If you've been in your house for a few years (and have built some equity up) and the market is active in your area, online is probably fine. The local banks will be better if it's not obvious to someone in Bangor, ME that your neighborhood in San Diego is worth substantially more than the crappy area 2 miles away. I've had 3 mortgages, one from a regional bank, one from a broker-sourced national mortgage company and another from a local bank. The bigger banks had better statements and were easier to do stuff with online. The smaller bank has been a better overall value, because the closing costs were low and they waived some customary fees.  In my case, the national mortgage company had a better APR, but my time horizon for staying in the house made the smaller bank (which had a competitive APR, about a half point higher than the lowest advertised) a better value due to much lower up-front costs.
If you're happy manually downloading transaction files from your bank and importing them into your desktop application, try You Need A Budget 4.  It hits all three of your requirements. Here are the details about how to import from your bank I've been using YNAB for a few months now and am very impressed with it.  It was cheap and it syncs to my mobile phone for on-the-go money management via Dropbox.
I recommend an online savings account.   The money is more liquid without early withdrawal fees and frequently you can get a visa/mastercard check card to access the funds. Looking at interest rates, ING is currently paying 1.10% and bankrate reports the best interest rate in the country on a 1 year CD is 1.33%.   The .23% difference is not enough to convince me to invest in CDs at a fixed rate vs. an online savings account at a variable rate when we are at (or near) the bottom of CD/savings interest rates.
They may have been the least stinky dirty shirt but they would have gone down with every other big bank had the feds not stepped in.  Further, they agreed to a 13 billion dollar fine for their role in the financial crisis. An innocent bank doesn't do that.
IMO this means one of two things: the bank thinks that 3 months from now, the interest rates it plans to offer will be lower than 1%; after 180 days, it will go up again. the bank needs more short-term cash than mid-term cash right now, so it offers you a better deal. In either case, it is unlikely that your 90 day intrest rate will be available 90 days from now, and most likely it will be below 1% unless the bank yet again needs short-term cash from its customers. With those proposed rates, I would go for half in 90 days and half in 270 days. Disclaimer: am no economist, just spent a lot of time the past year fretting over the same kind of questions.  Feel free to tell me where I'm wrong if you think I am.
Possible (unlikely) reasons: But usually, yeah, if you can pay cash, you should.
Whoever told you to make major purchases in physical cash should probably be audited because the only real reason someone would be doing something so goofy would be to avoid digital records or maybe taxes somehow.  ... or worse, they listen to Dave Ramsey.
In the U.S., most car dealers provide lease financing through one company (usually a subsidiary of the auto manufacturer). Whereas they provide loan financing through a variety of companies, some of whom offer very high interest rate loans and sell the loans as collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). Have you checked whether Chase or First Tech Credit Union offers a suitable car lease?
Lets look at it this way. Your son bought the car and then 2 days later, he wants to change the price. Will the dealership let him do that after all the paperwork is signed?
"To put a positive spin on the whole thing, maybe it's a small family shop, and having the check made out to ""cash"" means that your barber can hand it to someone else without the need to countersign. Or maybe his last name is ""Cash"" - there was a pretty famous singer who fit that description. Either way, it's not your place to nanny his finances."
You could consider buying a fairly recent used car from CarMax. They have fixed pricing, and you'd save a good amount of money on the car (since cars lose tons of value in their first year or so).
"We have what we call ""unallocated savings"" that go into a fund for this purpose. We'll also take advantage of ""6 months no interest"" or similar financing promotions, and direct this savings towards the payments."
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One thing the sales guy could have done was not tell you we wasn't going to honor this price if you came back. Occasionally there would be an internet buyer, and I showed no unpleasantness even though internet sellers could crush our brick and mortar shop. I would mention a competitive price and if he bought it, great, and if not, that's just business. As for the buyer, I would treat these tactics with a certain detachment. I would personally chuckle at his treatment and ask if I could kick the tires, an user car saying. I suppose the bottom line is if you are ready to buy this specific model, and if the price is right (and the shop is ethical so you won't get ripped off with garbage), then you have to be ready to buy on the spot. I will point out one horrible experience I had at a car dealership. I came in 15 minutes before closing and a sales person gave me a price almost a third cheaper than list. I wasn't ready to buy on my first visit ever to a dealership and of course, buying a car has all kinds of hidden fees. I asked will this be the price tomorrow, and he said absolutely not. I told him, ""so if I come in tomorrow morning, your dealer clock has only gone 15 minutes"" but that logic did not register with him. Maybe he thought I was going to spend 15k on the spot and pressure tactics would work on me. I never came back, but I did go another dealership and bought a car after a reasonable negotiation."
But if it takes 2 days+, The truck isn't out there, or the dealer doesn't have a vehicle the other dealership wants back, or no other dealership likes dealing with them. The only way it would take that long is if you were looking for something very rare, an odd color in an unusual configuration. Like a top end model in a low selling color, or configuration you had to have that wouldn't sell well - like you wanted all the options on a car except a cigarette lighter, you get the idea. 99.99% of the time a good enough truck is available. Deposits are BS. They don't setup any kind of real contract, notice most of the time they want a check. Because holding on to a check is about as binding as making you wear a chicken suit to get a rebate. All it is, is a test to see if you will go through with signing the deal. As an example of why you don't let time pass on a car deal is shown in this. One time we had a couple want us to find a Cadillac Escalade Hybrid in red with every available option. Total cost was about $85-90k. Only two new Red Escalade hybrids were for sale in the country at the time, one was in New York, and the other was in San Fransisco, and our dealership is in Texas, and neither was wanting to trade with us, so we ended up having to buy the SUV from one of the other dealerships inventory. That is a very rare thing to do by the way. We took a 25% down payment, around $20,000, in a check. We flew a driver to wherever the SUV was and then drove it back to Texas about 4 days later. The couple came back and hated the color, they would not take the SUV. The General Manager was pissed, he spent around $1000 just to bring the thing to Texas, not to mention he had to buy the thing. The couple walked and there was nothing the sales manager, GM, or salesman could do. We had not been able to deliver the car, and ultimately the dealership ate the loss, but it shows that deposits are useless.
There's a good explanation of this type of scam at the following link; It's known as a Spot-Delivery scam. https://www.carbuyingtips.com/top-10-scams/scam1.htm Also, I read this one a while back, and immediately this post reminded me of it: http://oppositelock.kinja.com/when-the-dealership-steals-back-the-car-they-just-sold-1636730607 Essentially, they claim you'll get one level of financing, let you take the car home, and then attempt to extort a higher financing APR out of you or request more money / higher payments. Check your purchasing agreement, it may have a note with something along the lines of 'Subject to financing approval' or something similar. If it does, you might be 'out of luck', as it were. Contact an attorney; in some cases (Such as the 'oppositelock.kinja.com' article above) consumers have been able to sue dealers for this as theft.
As long as you don't finance and the payment is upfront, its up to you and your customer how to pay. If you provide the product before the payment is being made or finance in any way (i.e.: there's debt), then the Canadian dollar, being legal tender in Canada, must be accepted. Considering the large amount, you would probably not be accepting cash anyway, so the point is moot. How they pay their credit cards is not your problem. However, do take into the account the currency exchange rates and fees that add costs to purchasing your product. If you don't have any physical presence (i.e.: online store only, no physical location on Canadian soil), then it goes by the rules of the jurisdiction where you've incorporated. Check with the local legal professional to be sure.
There are legitimate reasons: I wouldn't jump the gun and assume that this person is avoiding taxes, etc. Barbers are usually licensed professions. Since it's generally a cash business, they tend to get audited more often by the tax authorities. That said, I wouldn't pay her with a check -- you have no idea who is actually cashing the check, and you could run into issues with unknown third parties misusing your account information.
Why would you even accept 75K in cash? If anything is going to trigger an audit, this will be it. 75K in cash deposited will look like money laundring, so you better have a paper trail ready to prove this is legal or this won't end well.