Automations triggered around things like payday or set billing time to autopay.
Scenario: As soon as pay hits the account, the amounts set in each bucket e.g. Groceries, automatically go into the appropriate bucket. This makes it super easy to set up a budget.
Similarly, say your Internet/phone bill is $330 a month and you get paid weekly. Some money is set aside in a “phone bill bucket” every week and at the end of the month, the correct amount is paid out to the phone company when it’s due.
Bucket Assignment for Direct Deposits
Would also be cool to look at being able to specify a bucket in-app for any Direct Deposits setup, e.g. if the phone company is charging your bank account directly, then you can specify in-app which bucket it should draw from.
You could potentially do this retrospectively from a notification.
e.g. Spark has charged your account $330. Would you like to assign this to a bucket going forward?
Then a tick box in the selection might allow you to “also include previous direct deposits”
Direct Deposit Cancellation
Would also be cool if you could reverse a direct deposit authority for a given company from its bucket or place a hold, e.g. if you’ve changed gyms. It would also be good if you could schedule this function to take place at a set date, e.g. after notifying your gym that you’re leaving, you might reverse your gym’s direct deposit authority from next month.
This will eliminate the need for multiple bank accounts and having to transfer funds into each, since funds will automatically have gone into each bucket.
You could set up a savings bucket so any change spent is rounded up to the nearest dollar into that bucket. ASB is the only bank who does this, I’ve saved $229.03 since implimented it, but I’ve had to use those funds over time.
Payments: some places are now starting to charge for Paywave, and I’m not being informed of such. Places who accept Paywave must inform customers of the extra charge, or honour the original price.
Direct Debit: I lost trust in those years ago, since I found out funds were taken out without consent. In India, autocharging for subscriptions has been banned by the Indian Banking authority because people were being charged and they might have forgotten, E.G. Apple In-app subscriptions in India must now be prepay, so you must top up your Apple account before the subscription payment goes out.
Having buckets for subscriptions could work like this.
Sign up for Spotify.
Instead of giving your debit/credit card number, you login with Debut.
Using the Akahu API, or an API Debut could develop in future, you get a page like:
Spotify is wanting to charge $14.99 per month for Premium, on date/time.
How do you want to pay?
Subscriptions bucket: Some people might pull all their funds for subscriptions.
Create a bucket for Spotify. I like to separate all my purchases into separate buckets, so funds get charged only from those buckets.
Next you have two options:
Ongoing: Charge until cancel.
Charge once: Useful if just wanting to trial. Some companies offer a 30 day free trial, but a payment method must be specified first and full cycle must be taken.
If you’re happy, Find the Authorise Payment button then press/click it.
The transaction will go through and you’ll have Spotify Premium, and the charge will be applied the correct bucket.
Yes love this idea - everytime I check my current banking app I wish I could do this - it would help me review and monitor my budgets more easily. Would be great if we can easily edit and re-name/personalise our buckets too
In NZ I don’t think you have to overcomplicate it like that and rely on tools like Akahu to do the transfers out to other platforms.
To re-use existing infra if virtual cards could be pinned to bucket you could use the card details specific to that bucket as your payment method for those transactions. While not the most elegant solution, but it would be easy enough to build provided virtual cards could be spun up/down easily.
Buckets are great but only if there is a way to direct money out of a bucket automatically. Either they have their own account numbers OR there is way to automatically cover transactions from the main account.
This is an issue with some saver products as they say split your money up but when you want to for example pay rent out of one of these buckets, you can’t as they don’t have their own account number / you can’t setup a DD outside of your main account.
Thinking on the spending side of these buckets, would be great to assign categories to a bucket so that when I spend on my card, each transaction is then assigned to a bucket based on it’s category.
