OldShooter
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
We are close to maximum simplicity; Virtually all of our assets are at Schwab, including tIRA, Roth, and cash accounts. I have a Schwab Bank checking account. 95% of our equity tranche is in one mutual fund and 95% of our fixed income tranche is in TIPS. Monthly statements are very, very simple.
DW maintains a checking account at Wells. She uses it for day-to-day things, but its main purpose is to give us a local means for getting cash amounts larger than feasible with ATMs. Sometimes when we travel internationally we get better prices if we offer to bring cash. Schwab's web site makes it very easy to transfer cash to DW's account. Having this backup account also means that we travel with two independent debit cards for use at ATMs. (We also travel with two independent Visa cards. Not Amex, which is commonly refused outside the US.)
Simple is good. I am not at all worried about Schwab going under. There is plenty of protection for that. Ref @COcheesehead's Post #19.
Re @MRG's comments in Post #12 about software issues, I think that is a real but low probability risk. I don't worry about it, though; we are investors not traders so temporarily losing access to our accounts would be highly annoying but not much more than that.
DW maintains a checking account at Wells. She uses it for day-to-day things, but its main purpose is to give us a local means for getting cash amounts larger than feasible with ATMs. Sometimes when we travel internationally we get better prices if we offer to bring cash. Schwab's web site makes it very easy to transfer cash to DW's account. Having this backup account also means that we travel with two independent debit cards for use at ATMs. (We also travel with two independent Visa cards. Not Amex, which is commonly refused outside the US.)
Simple is good. I am not at all worried about Schwab going under. There is plenty of protection for that. Ref @COcheesehead's Post #19.
Re @MRG's comments in Post #12 about software issues, I think that is a real but low probability risk. I don't worry about it, though; we are investors not traders so temporarily losing access to our accounts would be highly annoying but not much more than that.