Digital money pots?

Question

I want to be able to create digital money pots, similar to the physical piggy banks people keep at home, i.e.

Pot 1: Money for food per month
Pot 2: Money for car fuel per month
Pot 3: Money for fun
Pot 4: Toys for children
Pot 5: Cloths shopping
Pot 6: Gas/Electricity per month

I want to be able to create as many or as little of these pots as needed/wanted.

I have a bank account with whom I have 2 accounts, I use 1 account to keep money for general monthly bills and the other account for extra stuff. I have asked the bank to allow me to open many more accounts but they will not allow it.

I have opened an account with another bank, but it becomes difficult to manage these money pots if spread across different accounts.

So my question is, is it possible to create some sort of digital money pots where you can have as many of these pots as you want and ideally with credit/debit card attached to them too?

The answer will probably be no, so my next question is, what would be the next best closest equivalent to my original question?

Answer 1

If you can live with managing the individual category amounts yourself, this is trivial. Just set up a spreadsheet listing each category (and a column for the total amount of money in the account), adding or subtracting as you deposit or withdraw money to the account. To the bank it will be just one (physical) account, but to you, it can be any number of (accounting asset) accounts. You can choose to keep a history, or not. It's all up to how complex you want to make it.

It doesn't even have to be a spreadsheet - you can just as well do this on paper if you prefer that. But the computer makes it easier. I imagine most personal finance software will help you, too; I know GnuCash can be coaxed into doing this with only a bit of creativity, and it almost certainly isn't the only one.

I do this myself and it works very well. I don't know but imagine that companies do it all the time: there is no reason why there must be a one-to-one relationship between bank accounts and accounting asset accounts, and in fact, doing so would probably quickly become impractical.

Answer 2

I guess it depends on your bank. My bank (Rabobank) recently did introduce this feature. You don't get a card per category, though. Instead you set up rules to match each expenditure to one of the existing pots.