Okay… So late one night a long time ago I had an idea on how to make banking more useful for me, and it was as simple as folders.

Let’s say I want to save money for a car and a house. Currently, the easiest way to track such a thing would be to open up two new accounts and funnel money into them as you earn it, but for some people, having three bank accounts just to save for things is rediculous. So they have one account for bills, and one for savings, and while that is all well and good, they won’t be able to easily divide up savings for different things, also, if they need to take money from that savings account, they have to remember to use that account, rather than the chequing acount they use to pay bills with.

Why not have folders? They would not effect anything on the bank side, as it would only be for the user/customer’s piece of mind. They would be able to create folders for both their house savings and their car savings and specify percentages of money that should automatically be assigned to that folder.

Here is a quick mock-up I did. I wish I had two grand in my bank account, but I don’t. This is just to help you understand the concept that banks should be putting into place.

So let’s say the person goes and takes eight hundred dollars out of his account to go pay off something. The actual account when being used, does not care about the folders. It will just take from the account as though there are no such things.

When the person goes to look at their account online, it will have taken $700 from their bills folder, and $100 from their car folder to pay for the $800. They can then redistribute the remaining cash they have assigned to folders or leave it the way it is.

Why would it take $100 from the car folder? Well, the positioning of the folders in the list tell which ones to draw from and at which time. The last thing you would want to do is take all the money from your folder that is monitoring your house savings right?

This would allow you to easily manage your money, without creating various accounts. Transfers between folders would be free. The actual folders service could be worth $2 a month. This would allow customers to save a little bit of money, while at the same time gaining cash for the bank through a new service. Also, the first company to do something like this will probably see an increase in new customers as organizing money is one of the hardest things for most people.

Just my two cents…