5 reasons my bank Bunq saves me thousands of $$$ yearly and why you should care about Fintech (free money-saving spreadsheet inside)
I use Bunq — it’s a Dutch bank showcasing themselves to be the “bank of the free”. They are available in a number of European countries.
They started exposing an API to interact with their banking engine some time ago. To list transactions, post payments etc. It’s pretty progressive, and they started doing this long before most banks came out with their Open Banking strategies (which of course came to be thanks to PSD2 — thanks Brussels!)
I’ve always wanted to have an overview of my finances and my spending but as a developer-has-been I’m also way too lazy to actually manually import any transactions or data from my banks into whatever budgeting software I used.
As a result I’ve been using a Google spreadsheet an ex-colleague initiated (thanks Tim!) to track all of my finances for a couple of years now. It used to include the positions on stocks, crypto and all the gazillion Fintech bank accounts I used for different purposes.
This has changed in the last year. I stopped using ING, N26, Revolut and some others I don’t remember the name of but probably have a free Mastercard with somewhere. I’m all-in on Bunq and thoroughly enjoying it.
The reason is that Bunq has progressively out-competed the others in terms of how I can personalize my experience when using them. I’ll lay out my usage below.
Reason 1: The money flow
In order to save as much money and brain-cycles as possible, I have a system in place which runs automatically. It ensures I save and invest before I spend.
All of the following takes place in Bunq.
My “automatic” account receives the monthly income. I have set up a couple of automatic transactions to take place after I get this income. They make sure I save what I want to save, invest what I want to invest and pay all necessary standing bills, such as a mortgage I’m paying off. This is important to me that it happens as hands-off as possible.
Every week a fixed amount for daily expenses is automatically sent. This comes out of the income account. I have one Bunq maestro card normally tied to this expense account, although I have a backup pin on it which can be used if that account runs out. If I make a big, unplanned purchase in a store I can also switch the account the card is connected to in the Bunq app.
Now, my mental model is such that once the money in the expense account is gone I have to wait until Monday when I get the next allowance. This works surprisingly well as a control mechanism. The amount of the allowance has been largely static after I found an amount that works for my lifestyle.
I have a couple of other accounts with Bunq as well, all IBAN-enabled, which deal with utilities as well as a shared account between me and my partner.
Reason 2: Freedom to choose your own system
It is striking how fast you get used to the reality of creating new accounts at will. Since they are also IBAN-enabled, you can really start to segment your personal finance. For instance, I have a business expense account where I get the expenses paid out when the company I work for reimburses me. The credit card I use to cover business expenses is set up in such a way as to debit that expense account when the bill is due.
That way I immediately notice if I have forgotten to report any expenses or if I should be reimbursed for foreign-exchange fees or similar.
Similarily with tax, whenever I have a personal business income I immediately save the estimated tax deduction of that invoice into the Tax account. Easy peasy. No more surprise tax bills.
Reason 3: My tailor-made Personal Finance Management system
At some point in the past, I got fed up with not understanding where my money went all the time.
You know how it is, you get your salary then two weeks later you’re staring at way too little in the account but you have at least a few birthdays coming up and a date or two with prospective men/women.
This was my reality at times in my younger twenties.
Since then I’ve tried out many different ways of dealing with my finances. I did strict budgeting for a while. Using a tool like You need a budget I was manually entering every transaction and categorizing continuously. It did save me money the year I stuck to it but once I lost the routine the backlog of transactions to enter grew too large, too fast. So I dropped it.
I started experimenting with using web-scraping technologies to get the transactions from my bank account into Ynab. They broke with every iteration of the bank’s online environment so that quickly became too brittle and thus I abandoned that approach as well.
Then Bunq released their API and have been improving it since. I got an account early on and quickly built an integration to get my account data (balances and transactions) into the sheet I’m using to track my finances.
I’ve since stopped caring about each transaction but do care about my balances and the tendencies over time. This approach works far better for me than tracking and categorizing each transaction, trying to control spending based on types of purchases.
I analyze the data programmatically to give me an idea of how much, on average, I save per quarter. With this data, I get an idea of how long, in the current tempo, it’ll take me to reach the different long term financial goals I have set up.
This makes it very motivating to not spend unnecessarily since I can see how many days/weeks/months further away I get from my goal by buying that one trinket.
I’ve seen that this has even caused me to save up in the expense account instead of taking from my savings so that I could buy the thing with less guilt. (From a psychological perspective I’m sure that says more than I’d wish about myself 😁)
Reason 4: Best exchange rates
Fin-tech companies are doing their best to challenge the “incumbent” banks all over the world. One of these companies is TransferWise. Bunq has partnered with TransferWise and through that partnership they now offer a MasterCard which automatically will give you the best exchange rate possible when withdrawing or spending in a foreign currency.
Going to Georgia and Turkey? No problem. Save 36€ on withdrawals and purchases in just a few days of traveling.
Reason 5: Interest, no hidden fees and more
Bunq offers you the freedom to decide what happens with your money. You can choose to receive interest on your cash (I’ve received 16€ so far!) or simply not. There are no hidden fees that hit you after withdrawing from an ATM or making an international payment. For the exact fees you can check here.
Personally I prefer paying one simple fee all-in instead of getting micro-cuts here and there. With this complete fee it makes it easy for me to see whether it’s worth it to pay a somewhat premium price for a bank account. With the amount I travel and the personal finance system I have set up it definitely is worth it to me. I couldn’t imagine any other way right now actually.
Conclusion
None of the above was possible just 2–3 years ago. The market is moving very, very fast right now and we, the consumers, are becoming able to really leverage this new exciting reality.
Personally I’ve used it to save money and become more aware of my spending patterns and what works and doesn’t work for me regarding budgeting and saving.
I’m curious and excited to see what will come in the future. I am considering to expand my Google Sheets integration to cover more banks than Bunq if some interesting use case warrants it or people start asking for it.
Next steps
Follow the journey of making a Hands-Off Money Flow Companion Add-On:
