Mmm. So now, it’s only three.

My wife and I are up to 14 checking and saving accounts now. Sign up bonuses and chasing rates are the main culprits. 22 credit card accounts with 10 currently involved in arbitrage schemes.
Add to that several brokerage accounts and several more at treasury.gov.

Quicken now takes about 15 minutes to update. It’s madness I tell you. Somebody, please make me stop!

personal checking – discretionary money (groceries/etc)
bills checking – account to keep money in to make sure bills get taken care of.
local savings – 1k to keep around in case of emergencies (when credit cards wont do)
ing direct – all extra money goes here for high interest
Credit Union savings – keep around to stay active with bank in case I need a loan (mainly car). They offer really good rates.
Credit Union checking – so I can easily get money out of the CU savings account.

The main problem comes when I pay off the CC each month. I keep a spreadsheet of where each transaction should come from (personal,bills,savings) and then make payments from each account to the CC. So I make 3 payments to the CC each month.

Is it too much?

Our e-fund is in another CU account with my wife as primary; we did this originally since we occasionally have over $100K in our CU accounts.

The CU pays 5% on its savings accounts and has a local branch, which I use every month or so for wires and paper check deposits.

Total 16

8 total…Dang!

2. Primary personal savings account at ING. This is where the “pay myself first” automatic transfer goes at the beginning of every month, and also where the “whatever’s left over” manual transfer goes at the end.

3. Joint savings account with my fiancee at ING. Not much in this right now…will probably replace #2 account with it after we’re married.

4. Joint savings account with my fiancee at my mortgage bank. This has $10K and change in it, but it’s frozen as additional security on the mortgage. Will be unfrozen and moved to someplace paying better interest when we refinance. (It gets released at the end of August, but we’ll be refinanced before the end of March.)

5. Old savings account at Comerica, from when I lived in Michigan. This still, IIRC, has my mother’s name on it as well as mine, just to show how old it is. No clue how much money is in it.

6. “Demand draft” (checking) account from Suburban Family Credit Union. This might actually be closed now…I know I haven’t touched it since late 2002, and it never had much money in it. When I lived less than 90 minutes away from the nearest ATM that it’d give me free access to, I used this in place of the #1 account.

7. Business checking account with Washington Mutual, for the video-production business I’m in the process of starting. This account was only opened this month and only has $500 in it, but (hopefully) will soon see a great deal of activity, once I finish the recruiting-and-shooting-and-editing phase and thus have some product to sell.

8 to [UNDISCLOSED]. Various accounts for my non-US-based businesses. Used to receive deposits from overseas clients and shelter them from US taxes as assets of an offshore corporation, rather than income of a US citizen. Which is all I’m willing to say in public about them. (For the record, yes this is legal. For me. In my situation. But my situation is somewhat unique, and I don’t reccomend that anyone else try it unless they know exactly what they’re doing, and have obtained competent advice from both an attorney and an accountant who are familiar with such matters.)

So yeah. Lots of bank accounts. I’ll eventually consolidate some of them (for example, the mortgage reserve account will go away as soon as we refinance to a more lenient mortgage lender, and the personal ING account will probably be replaced with the joint ING account after we’re married, at which point there’ll be no point in keeping the older one open), but my life will probably always contain a profusion of banks.

ING – 1 Savings, 1 “Electric Orange” checking
Emigrant – 1
HSBC – 1 (If they ever mail me my password, this will be my primary savings account for now.)
WaMu – 1 Checking (formerly my primary), and 1 Savings @ 5%.
Bank I work at: 2 checking, 1 of which is my primary.

I also plan to open a DDA account at a local credit union since I do plan on buying a house some day, and another at BoA since I have a code to get $75 for opening an account.

I’m thinking about opening a taxable investment account, but haven’t gotten around to it yet. And I’ll start contributing to a 401k after the wedding (before you yell, there’s no employer matching contribution that I’m missing out on).

So right now, five, but it’ll be seven by the end of the year.

Rollover IRA account (NYL), Roth (at Vanguard) and 401(k)(at UMB – required). Taxable investment account.

So five at brick banks, one online bank, four investment. Holy cow. It COULD be more complicated, I guess!

There are benefits to premium banking for those with high savings.

Now that I think about it, though, I should have said four. I have my paypal account set up as a money market account, so I can get interest off of money coming into there as well.