I use a HYSA as my Checking Account

I use a HYSA as my checking account, and it's one of the easiest upgrades you can make to your finances. I keep one month of expenses in my checking account so I can always pay my bills and pay my credit card in full every single month without having to worry about overdrafting and timing my paychecks. I like to stay a month ahead of my finances. But this means I had thousands of dollars just sitting in my checking account earning like a penny a month. So I decided to find a high yield savings account that had all of the checking account features I needed, but also allowed me to earn interest on my money. I have a link to the account I use in my Stan Store, but to earn a higher interest, you have to set up direct deposit, which was actually convenient because I wanted to switch it over to be my actual main checking account. So my direct deposit goes directly into my higher savings account. All of my bills are auto-paid to this account, my rent, my credit cards, everything. There's no transaction limits. You can treat it like an actual checking account. You do also get a checking account, but I never have money in here. But they do provide you with a debit card for this checking account if you need one. Some pros to using this high yield savings account as a checking account are obviously earning higher interest. There's no monthly maintenance fees. You can get your direct deposit and they have additional savings features where you can bucket your savings if you want to do that. But I personally keep my savings from my checking, so I have a separate high yield savings account for my actual savings. And this high yield savings account is just for my checking account. If that makes sense? We keep them separate. The biggest con to using a high yield savings account as a checking account is that they're online banks, so they don't have a lot of the traditional features that a brick and mortar bank would have. But there is a free ATM network if you need cash and you can check if you have one near you. An underrated feature of SoFi, though, is their rewards. They have a bunch of different ways to earn points that you could redeem as cash or what I do is redeem towards my student loan. You can earn 1% cash back on all of your automatic investing and I invest $500 a month with SoFi, which means I get $5 in rewards every single month that go directly towards my SoFi student loan. I see it as SoFi paying some of the interest on their own student loan is pretty convenient. I've had this account for years and I am obsessed. I've never had any issues. Let me know if you have any other questions. Baby, baby. Stop. Winston's just scratching the wall.