A schematic diagram with three linked accounts. Center: 'Operating' — a checking account holding one to two months of spending. Left: 'Reserve' — a high-yield savings account holding three to six months of expenses. Right: 'Idle' — a brokerage money-market fund holding balances beyond the reserve. Arrows show the routine flows: paychecks land in Operating; a fixed monthly transfer moves the excess to Reserve; quarterly, balances above the reserve floor move to Idle. Annotations on each arrow indicate the trigger and the amount.
A simple two-column layout showing Operating at Bank A and Reserve + Idle at Bank B. The rationale is written below: if Bank A has an outage or a fraud freeze, the household can operate for weeks from Bank B. Redundancy is cheap and repeatedly demonstrated to be worth it.
- Three accounts, two banks. Routine flows are automated.
- Redundancy across institutions is a household resilience decision, not a paranoia.
Diagrams and schematics accompanying this lesson.