Prospective long term or fulltime RVers, having an abundance of valid questions, seldom fail to ask how to maintain checking, savings and investment accounts. My advice has always been to charge everything possible, including calling cards, fuel, campgrounds, groceries, entertainment, tours and restaurants. Also, we suggest having every possible bill and all income transferred electronically to your financial accounts. We each have our own credit card, to maintain our credit status separately, in the event of the unthinkable happening. It is highly advisable to have all your credit cards, checking and savings accounts consolidated to the same full service banking facility.
This is easier to accomplish before going fulltime, but is not impossible later. You can then arrange for transfers and payments to be performed with only one banking facility to coordinate with. At months end, one simply pays off those credit card charges incurred during the previous month. After doing that, it's amazing how little spending cash one needs to carry, and ATMs can keep up with that. When possible, we request that refunds be credited to our credit cards but those seemingly, unavoidable small refund or rebate checks are still a problem. However, they can all be collected and deposited at one time via ATM to avoid multiple ATM charges, but don't allow them to extend beyond the validity date on any check.
What's all this got to do with "Computing on the Road"? For us, it's a whole lot. One way or another our PC becomes involved with anything having to do with money, or our lack of it. We simply don't write many paper checks anymore and those we do are printed out on our portable printer. Even deposit slips are printed out in the RV. Everything is done via our PC to manage the: credit cards, check cards, check book, long distance calling card, or electronic funds transfer between our savings, investment and checking accounts. For RVers to accomplish this, we strongly believe a portable or laptop PC, with an appropriate modem is an absolute necessity.
Once you've decided to consolidate all financial dealings with a single financial institution, some real thought is in order to determine what bank or institution is appropriate. If you do significant stock or mutual funds trading, a Schwab type account might be in order. They provide all the classical banking functions plus offer online investment buying, trading and tracking. On the otherhand, they tend to have higher and more service charges than some full service banks. Since our stock and mutual funds activity is limited to that of 401K and another similar deferred compensation plan, we didn't need a Schwab type account. Both of those investment plans have 800 number dial up capability to move investments from one mutual fund to another or to move any or all money into or out of the money market funds. These accounts are accessible for transactions much like a Templeton type mutual fund account would be. Since we didn't need our financial institution to perform stock type transactions, we chose to consolidate with NationsBank and use their online banking program.
As far as we can determine, all of the online banking services are quite similar in their offerings and PC software features. Some may be a bit more intuitive and user friendly than others but let's face it, they must offer all services, on as many PC Operating Systems as possible or potential customers will go elsewhere. The competition for your business and money, is extensive. You will typically pay about $20.00 for the software, users manual and initial set up of online accounts. Unless you have a ton of money tied up in their bank, you can expect to pay a fixed $5.00 fee per month for PC online service charges.
While these services are almost the same between banks, there is one major difference in the way one gets in contact with some banks' computers. Schwab, NationsBank and many others have installed their own modem sets and an 800 number to dial. Some others are using the Internet to accomplish this connectivity. In the later case you attach to their server in much the same way you would to any other Internet browser server, enter your password and conduct financial business. By dialing a financial institution's direct 800 number, you are not similarly connected to an entire world of Internet users. This manner of connectivity is as secure as a telephone call from one telephone to another, not an Internet party line.
I have little doubt that encryption/scrambling methods used today, plus other new innovations, will eventually make Internet connectivity very secure. For now, I am not convinced the risk is worth it. For the same reason, I would never give our main credit card numbers out to a WEB server on the Internet, whether they claim to be secure or not. We have only one joint ownership credit card and it is limited to a very small charge amount. We use it exclusively for Internet buying and have thus limited our liabilities on that account. While I don't want to lose $250.00 to a hacker or dishonest business, we can reasonably take that risk. We refuse to do the same to all our finances.
After installing the online banking software, one fully balances the checkbook and savings accounts. You access the program and enter in the balances and outstanding checks. Then click on something like "Connect to the Bank", causing the PC to dial the bank and further reconcile the accounts. From there one decides how they wish to manage the accounts. You can enter each credit card, check card or check written as they occur or simply wait for them to be processed by the bank. We tend to let credit and check card transactions simply occur. The bank processes them very quickly and dialing in posts them on the PC in a rather timely manner. On the other hand we tend to enter, on the PC, the few checks we send because of delays in the recipients cashing them and the time it takes the various banks involved to process and clear them. Income posting via electronic funds transfer is available to your PC about 24 hours after the deposit but that is no big problem.
Credit card debts are always due on the same day of the month. We do not need to wait for the itemized bill to arrive by regular postage. We already have it on the PC. On some business day before payment is due, it is easy to select the credit card account on the PC and select "Pay It". You can elect to pay any or all of it from either the checking or savings account. The next time you dial in, the payment transaction occurs. If you find you have excess funds in the checking account simply select transfer funds. Identify "from" checking "to" savings and the amount. That too will occur on the next dial in but most banks require transfers to be performed on a business day and the PC transaction posted date must be the same day it is dialed in.
When you dial in to access your accounts the bank sends each check, credit card, or savings transaction with appropriate information. Who and when the transaction was for, how much it was for and a default category description of the type is sent. One can modify the category description to relate to the actual purpose of the purchase. For example, with a restaurant bill I select eating out, for fuel I select that. For food I select groceries. If necessary, you can split the description into multiple categories. In the end, one gets a full accounting of what they are spending money on.
You can let the system develop a budget based on your spending habits or you can enter the budget into it separately. The budget can even include projected savings per month or investment expectations. It will compare budgeted expectations against reality and produce graphs or charts letting you know how things are going. We entered our very detailed budget and that works well for us. Most, if not all, fulltimers, did extensive planning before taking the big leap. Budgeting is inevitably part of that planning process. In our case, much of the budget planning was done to make certain we could actually afford it before quitting our fulltime jobs. I suspect many fulltimers and prospective fulltimers can relate to this. Posting our detailed, proposed budget into the banking program was the easy part. Developing a realistic budget was the really hard part.
For those payments that are due monthly and are for the same amount, you can set up the system to have the bank mail monthly checks on your behalf, on the day of the month you specify. This is great for things like RV payments, vehicle payments, storage fees, Insurance, etc. You get a confirmation of each check issued and you never worry about writing those checks and mailing them. One can even go so far as to schedule annual payments, such as home park maintenance fees, CCC, and other payment needs. Scheduling a bank for once a year checks just goes a bit too far for us and represent those few checks we send. Most banks allow for up to ten of these a month, without incurring additional service charges.
Other typical functions are inventory files for recording all those goodies in the RV or what you may have in storage and their values. Other features allow for monitoring investment accounts, automatically using Quotelink to monitor your selected stocks and mutual funds, estimating taxes, setting up a business account, or establishing a loan and payment schedule. Since we have separate credit cards and neither of us is an authorized participant in the others account, we had to set up two data bases in the program, but that was no big deal. We each have a check cashing VISA card associated with our checking account, but they look like a credit card to merchants. When using this card, the funds are transferred from our checking account to the merchant immediately rather than being applied to a credit card account.
Email is provided in the banking program for you to: get the reason for some of those service charges, directly challenge a credit card entry, or ask any question you wish of your bank. We found this feature better than actually calling the bank. In one case, when I was trying to cancel an Internet account and kept getting billed, we challenged it via the on line banking secure Email and they answered promptly. They asked us to send a short message explaining why we should not be billed. They took care of the situation, including calling them, coordinating the correction to the problem and then credited our charge account accordingly.
We feel comfortable dialing the bank once a week or so. In most cases we time that with the need to send or receive our regular Email. We do not hesitate to use our acoustic coupler to perform the process at 2400 bits per second over public payphones. Even though we carry radio, and cellular modem access capabilities on board, often the good old reliable acoustic coupler is the only way to accomplish connectivity. If you want to learn more about acoustic coupler use over public payphones see my previously posted article on that subject.
Banking while participating in the free roaming RV lifestyle, can be a real worry and headache. With PC online banking it is actually easier than when we were doing things the classical way from a fixed contemporary home and were less than a mile from familiar bank employees. For us, selecting the RV lifestyle is the best decision we have ever made. Like any lifestyle, there are some disadvantages and little hardships, laundry and keeping up with regular postage comes to mind. With on line PC banking, there is absolutely no need to add banking into the hard to accomplish or irritant category.
In our next article, we plan to discuss the many ways of backing up the precious data and files on your PC, so they can be recovered intact. As we become more and more dependent on computers to make life easier and more enjoyable, such as aspects discussed in this article, the need to protect ourselves from losing that data and programs grows increasingly important. The need isn't to protect oneself if the data isn't available it is to protect you when it happens, and happen it eventually will.
If you wish to comment on this any other of my articles, or simply want to ask a question about "Computing on the Road" send me an email (melchaney@dts.net) and I will respond in a timely manner.