Budgeting Made Easy with ING Direct

A budget is a very important tool to your financial well-being. The purpose of creating a budget is to save money for certain expenses. Budgeting basically tells your money where it should go. Often times, though, it can be difficult to keep track of all the different places we want, or need, to put our money. Say you have a car fund, a Christmas fund, an emergency fund, and a clothing fund all in one checking account. Then you need to make sure you have enough for the house payment and electric bill and groceries. You know it will soon be time to renew your car tags. How do you quickly determine which money is for which category? For many the process is so overwhelming that they simply don't do it. Others purchase expensive software to keep track of everything. I have an easier, and cheaper, solution: I let ING Direct do the work for me!

ING Direct, one of the hottest online banks known for their high interest savings accounts and wonderful referral program, has made budgeting easier than ever by letting you create separate linked accounts, or sub accounts. To do this, simply open an account with ING. It only takes a few minutes of your time. Just fill out the short online application, link it to your current checking account, read and agree to their terms and conditions and make a small deposit to your new account. Once that is done, ING will transfer two small, separate deposits into your account for verification purposes. Once you verify those deposit amounts, you can really get started!

Now that you have an existing account, simply log in and open another new account. You can open as many as you like, name each account and have all of your money separated for you. Create one account named "Christmas fund" or another named "property taxes". Each time you log in all of your accounts will show up so you can see how much money you have in each account and you know where all of your money belongs or how much more you need for each account, if any, all with very little time or effort. You can transfer money between accounts with the click of a button. The best part is there are no fees. Actually, they pay you.

With the ease of set-up, easy availability, and much higher interest rate than conventional brick and mortar banks, the question isn't why should you have separate accounts, it is why NOT have separate accounts?