Where Did All My Money Go So Fast?!

Ever check your bank account at the end of the month and wonder how in the world you could have spent so much money in the past few weeks?

     Bumble Bee Bank has just launched its new online Spending Plan and Money Manager services, available through the mobile app and the website. 
     I know from experience that expenses such as car, mortgage, and student debt payments or cellphone, internet, and cable bills stack up and it feels like the money I worked so hard so flies past my eyes and into someone else's hands. 

     The Spending Plan creates a realistic budget individualized to meet your specific lifestyle. The plan works by suggesting spending categories that most people use, such as entertainment, online services, gasoline, electronics, healthcare, and miscellaneous expenses. With those categories in mind, you can customize your own categories and designate an amount you are able to spend on each for either a week or month's time. 

     Every time you use your debit or credit card attached to the plan, Bumble Bee Bank will organize the purchase into its belonging category. It is also possible to manually enter the purchase into the correct category. Once each purchase or expense is paid, the target amount left in each category decreases. You can view your progress as an overview of the budget or in specific categories. This is an example of what my overview budget looked like in August:

     The Money Manager works in sync with the Spending Plan. All expenses and purchases are categorized and put into a pie chart to get a visual sense of where your money goes.

Insta-pay With Bill Pay

Would you like to pay your bills instantly?

     Banks have the goal of creating a captive audience. By designing an app to satisfy all of your money needs, we can assure you that all of your information will be safe and secure in one place. 
     From 2010 to 2013, there was a percentage increase from 62% to 69% concerning the online and mobile payments made on biller sites. Generation Xers and Yers, people born after the Baby Boomers and until 1994, are increasingly turning away from the mail and to electronic devices to pay their bills.
    The challenge that bankers face today is to get customers to use a bank BillPay system rather than a direct company payment. Some claims for turn offs are:

• "People don't like to "hunt all over the internet" to find their bills
• Younger people are lazy and don't like banks
• Mobile makes it harder, not easier, to get consumers to pay bills at a bank (vs. biller) site

     I can tell you, after working with numerous frazzled customers, that Bumblee Bee Bank has one of the simplest and safest BillPay apps available. To set up a relationship between the company and the bank, all you need to do is select the company genre or search for the company's name, then accept the confirmation email. After that you can choose to manually select payments or set up an automatic withdraw at your convenience.
     Younger people will fall in love with this app once they try it. Having car, rent, insurance, electricity, internet, phone, and cable bills in one easy place makes them hard to forget! Everything at your fingertips 24/7 makes no excuses to let anything slide!
   

I'll Be the Teller of Tellers

"Welcome to Bumble Bee Bank, how may I help you?"

     As a customer with valuable money, I bet you pay at least a little attention to the gal or guy that takes your money, gives you money, or you trust to pay your mortgage. Working at a bank being a "teller," since I was 18 years old with a tall figure, blonde hair, blue eyes, and a goofy wide smile has earned me some skeptical looks and questions when I am handed a check for $50,000 to apply to 3 loans, a mortgages, and a deposit. I got the feeling that I was not completely trusted to handle such a task, but little did they know that those were more or less the simple transactions.

     Many people do not realize the responsibilities that a "teller" has accumulated over the last handful of years. The reason I put quotation marks around the word is because that hardly describes the job at all. My title was a Financial Services Specialist, level One.

I could deposit checks into checking accounts, IRAs, HSAs, savings accounts, money market accounts; 
I could apply checks to mortgages, overdraft, home equity, line of credit, personal loans, auto loans, credit cards, collateral loans; 
I could cash checks for cash, withdrawals, Treasurer's Checks, money orders; 
I could do coin orders and cash change orders in any variety of variations; 
I could deposit your cash into any of the accounts or loans mentioned before or turn it into a check; 
I could encode personal checks, withdrawal tickets, or deposit tickets for you with the appropriate numbers; or 
I could help you turn your buckets and buckets of coin into dollar bills. And those were just the straight forward tasks.

     The slightly more difficult tasks would be working with our commercial lenders and mortgage specialists to cut closing checks, vendor checks, and applying new restrictions to accounts.

     Don't forget about all the personal relations we encounter every single day. Customers come in with questions about their account activity, the variety of products we offer, changes of address, reordering checks, broken or lost debit cards, "hot carding" and "warm carding" stolen and lost cards, disputing charges on the account, forgetting their online passwords, forgetting their pins, trying to cash checks for family or friends, and more financial questions you could possibility think of.

   The next component of working on the front line is probably the biggest. Security. Both with the physical money and the account information/protection. On the paperwork side, we need to determine what checks needs holds and how that process works, we complete the necessaries when large amounts of cash come in, and we have to file and order all signature cards and make sure they match your identity. The physical security measures are probably quite obvious with our ginormous vault, safety deposit boxes, ATM vault, night drop vault, and numerous audits of counting our money every day.

     Technology has played a big part in how we do things nowadays though. Now Bumble Bee bank has ECRs which are kinda like little vaults that usually two tellers share each. The ECR can take the money, sort it, count it, or give you the exact denominations we ask for. It's an amazing tool for us to use and it makes it a lot more difficult to rob!