How can I find a checking account that allows for automated transfers of dynamic amounts?
Almost any financial institution has the technical ability to do this (simply called sweeps, auto sweeps, or deposit sweeps); the issue you face is finding an institution that is willing to do it for you.  I think you will have the most luck at your primary financial institution where you currently keep the majority of your banking relationship.  You will have better luck at small-town banks and credit unions.  The mega banks will likely not waver from their established policies. Deposit sweeps are common for business accounts.  They are usually tied to a savings account, which is usually held within the same institution, however this is not a requirement.  The sweep can send money to any US bank if you can provide the routing number and account number.  The sweep will establish a peg balance, or floor balance, on the checking account.  At the end of the day, any amount above the peg is swept into the savings account automatically. I doubt you will find what you’re asking for within an online banking system.  You will likely have to go into a branch and speak with a personal banker.  Explain to them you want to establish a sweep on your checking account and want to send the funds to another financial institution.  You will have better luck asking for a peg of $100, or some other small amount.  They may not take your request seriously if you want to completely empty the checking account to zero.
"I would suggest opening a bank account that you use to accept deposits only, and then get a system set up where it automatically transfers the money over to your main account. If not instantly it could transfer the money hourly or daily. Of course you would have to pay a premium for this ""peace of mind"" ;)" Quicken has tools for this, but they have some quirks so i hesitate to actually recommend it on that basis. Dwolla looks to be a great option. But it requires users to have an account there (Free to sign up). And there rates are absolutely amazing.  Free for transactions under $10 $0.25 to receive money on transactions over $10 http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/12/13/small-bank-in-kansas-is-a-financial-testing-ground/ Citizens Bank of Weir might allow you to do this, their experimentation in speeding up bank transfers was pushing money over the debit card network. "If you want to deposit checks or conduct business at a window, you should look at a local savings bank or credit union. Generally, you can find one that will offer ""free"" checking in exchange for direct deposit or a minimum balance. Some are totally free, but those banks pay zippo for interest. If you don't care about location, I would look at Charles Schwab Bank. I've been using them for a couple of years and have been really satisfied with them. They provide free checking, ATM fee reimbursement, free checks and pre-paid deposit envelopes. You also can easily move money between Schwab brokerage or savings accounts. Other brokers offer similar services as well." Avoid talking to a person:  Just use an automated system, such as an ATM or a cellphone app.  Automated systems will ONLY scan for the RTN # and Account number at the bottom of the check (the funny looking blocky numbers). The automated system will not care who the check is made out to, or who is present, so long as you have an account to credit the money into, and the account number on the check can get the money debited properly. I do know that a blank check has all the information they need for the electronic transfer. They probably add it as a customer service to streamline future payments. Though I don't think automatically adding it makes good business sense. It is possible that the form used to submit the check included a line to added the account to the list of authorized accounts.  He might have been lucky he didn't set up a recurring payment.  I would check the website to see if there is a tool to remove the account info from the list of payment options. There has to be a way to edit the list so that if you change banks you can update the information, yet not keep the old accounts on the list. Talk to customer service if the website doesn't have a way of removing the account. Tell them that you have to edit the account information. And give them your info. If they balk at the change tell them that they could be committing fraud if the money is pulled from an unauthorized account. "The standard double-entry approach would just be to create a Liability account for the loan, and then make a transfer from that account to your Asset (Savings) account when the loan proceeds are distributed to you. After that point, the loan doesn't ""belong"" to your Savings account in any way. Each account and transaction is tracked separately. So, you might for instance pay that loan back with a transfer from your Checking account, even though the initial disbursement arrived into your Savings account. In order to see how much of a loan you have remaining, you need to look at the loan's Liability account to see what transactions occurred in it and what its remaining balance is. It sounds like what you're really trying to accomplish is the idea of  ""earmarking"" or ""putting into an envelope"" certain assets for certain purposes. This kind of budgeting isn't really something that Gnucash excels at. It does have some budget features, but there's more about being able to see how actual expenses are to expected expenses for a reporting period, not about being able to ask ""How much 'discretionary' assets do I have left before I start hitting my 'emergency fund'"". The closest you get is splitting up your asset accounts into subaccounts as you suggest, in which case you can ""allocate"" funds for your specific purposes and make transfers between them as needed. That can work well enough depending on your exact goals, though it can sometimes make it a little trickier to reconcile with your actual bank statements. But there's not really an accounting reason to associate the ""emergency fund"" portion of your assets with the remaining balance of your loan; though there's nothing stopping you from doing so if that's what you're trying to do. Accounting answers questions like ""How much have I spent on X in the past?"" and ""How much do I own right now?"". If you want to ask ""How much am I allowed to spend on X right now?"" or ""Am I likely to run out of money soon?"", you may want a budgeting tool rather than an accounting tool." 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. Given your needs, GNUcash will do swimmingly. I've used it for the past 3 years and while it's a gradual learning process, it's been able to resolve most stuff I've thrown at it. Schedule bills and deposits in the calendar view so I can keep an eye on cash flow.  GNUcash has scheduled payments and receipts and reconcilation, should you need them. I prefer to keep enough float to cover monthly expenses in accounts rather than monitor potential shortfalls.   Track all my stock and mutual fund investments across numerous accounts. It pulls stock, mutual and bond quotes from lots of places, domestic and foreign. It can also pull transaction data from your brokers, if they support that.  I manually enter all my transactions so I can keep control of them. I just reconcile what I entered into Quicken based on the statements sent to me. I do not use Quicken's bill pay There's a reconciliation mode, but I don't use it personally. The purpose of reconcilation is less about catching bank errors and more about agreeing on the truth so that you don't incur bank fees. When I was doing this by hand I found I had a terrible data entry error rate, but on the other hand, the bayesian importer likes to mark gasoline purchases from the local grocery store as groceries rather than gas. I categorize all my expenditures for help come tax time. GNUcash has accounts, and you can mark expense accounts as tax related. It also generates certain tax forms for you if you need that. Not sure what all you're categorizing that's helpful at tax time though. I use numerous reports including. Net Worth tracking, Cash not is retirement funds and total retirement savings. Tons of reports, and the newest version supports SQL backends if you prefer that vs their reports. "As far as I can tell there are no ""out-of-the-box"" solutions for this.  Nor will Moneydance or GnuCash give you the full solution you are looking for.  I imaging people don't write a well-known, open-source, tool that will do this for fear of the negative uses it could have, and the resulting liability.  You can roll-you-own using the following obscure tools that approximate a solution: First download the bank's CSV information: http://baruch.ev-en.org/proj/gnucash.html That guy did it with a perl script that you can modify. Then convert the result to OFX for use elsewhere: http://allmybrain.com/2009/02/04/converting-financial-csv-data-to-ofx-or-qif-import-files/" I use a hack to do this sort of thing: I have an ING Direct online bank account. I link both of bank accounts I want to transfer between to the ING Direct account. I transfer between them by moving money to ING direct and then from there to wherever. Any online bank that let's you link regular checking accounts would work for this. "Yes, that's all they do.  It's effectively an ""automatic saving/investing"" program.  Bank of America does something similar with ""Keep the Change"", transferring the leftovers from checking to savings. The basic concept here is that people are lousy at saving, so if you put money into savings/investments in some way that is not in your control, it will be better than if you do it under your control even if it costs something because you're going to spend whatever your checking account balance is - so if that balance is artificially reduced, you'll not spend that money and instead have it in savings.  This may be effective for some people, I don't know.  Not something I would touch with a ten foot pole." "I opened several free checking accounts at a local credit union.  One is a ""Deposit"" account where all of my new money goes.  I get paid every two weeks.  Every other Sunday we have our ""Money Day"" where we allocate the money from our Deposit account into our other checking accounts.  I have one designated as a Bills account where all of my bills get paid automatically via bill pay or auto-pay. I created a spreadsheet that calculates how much to save each Money Day for all of my upcoming bills.  This makes it so the amount I save for my bills is essentially equal.  Then I allocate the rest of my deposit money into my other checking accounts.  I have a Grocery, Household, and Main checking accounts but you could use any combination that you want. When we're at the store we check our balances (how much we have left to spend) on our mobile app.  We can't overspend this way.  The key is to make sure you're using your PIN when you use your debit card.  This way it shows up in real-time with your credit union and you've got an accurate balance.  This has worked really well to coordinate spending between me and my wife.  It sounds like it's a lot of work but it's actually really automated.  The best part is that I don't have to do any accounting which means my budget doesn't fail if I'm not entering my transactions or categorizing them. I'm happy to share my spreadsheet if you'd like." ACH transfers are reversible and traceable. So what's stopping them is the ease and the speed with which they would be caught. When you give a check - you have to provide some information to the payee so that they could cash it. You can't withhold the bank or the account number - how would they charge you? So it has to be on it, and if it is on it - it can be put on any other (fake) check. That is why checks come also with your signature, and are always available for you to inspect when they're cashed. If you notice something out of the ordinary (check you didn't give? ACH transfer you didn't authorize?) on your statement - it is your responsibility to notify the bank within X period of time (60 days, I think) of the statement, and it will be dealt with. So the best way to protect yourself would be to keep an eye on your account and verify that the transactions that you see are all authorized, and do it frequently. Keeping large amounts of cash on your checking account is never a good idea, regardless. Also, since checks are inherently unsafe - try to only give checks to people you trust, and use bill-pay or credit cards with anyone else.