When I was in my early 20s I worked for Wells Fargo bank. I spent about four years there and started my tenure in 24-hour customer service. It never ceased to amaze me how many of our customers didn’t track their purchases or even attempt to balance their accounts. When the accounts would overdraft, the customers were certain it had to be the bank’s error.
A practice that I heard about frequently and could not understand was when customers would round up the dollar amount in the register instead of logging in the actual transaction amount. The customers were convinced they then had a cushion against overdrafts. I would try to explain that you can’t balance the account, or know where discrepancies are, if you didn’t keep accurate records.
Years ago Bank of America started a service called Keep the Change®. Keep the Change is an automatic savings program that reminds me of the faulty accounting practices of my past customers. Instead of creating a false cushion while making bookkeeping impossible, actual savings takes place.
Keep the Change participants are Bank of America account holders. Every time a Keep the Change user makes a purchase with his debit card the transaction amount is deducted from the attached checking account. The savings part is the transaction amount is rounded up to the next dollar and the difference is transferred to a linked savings account. To encourage customers to take advantage of this automatic savings plan, Bank of America will match the savings in the first three months by 100-percent. Thereafter the bank will match five-percent of the savings up to $250 a year.
This method of savings is fairly painless. Cents at a time are transferred to the savings account. The incentive from the bank to enroll and keep saving is nice too.