Automate Transfers Between Accounts With This Checklist Trick

Let’s say your daughter wants to move 10 cents from her spending account to her savings account every day.

Or, maybe one sibling needs to pay another back for an intra-family loan and wants to schedule a weekly payment of $2.

You probably know FamZoo supports automated transfers with allowances and auto debits. The problem is, those always involve the parent’s primary funding card. It’s either the source or the destination for the transfer. Unfortunately, that’s not the case with the two scenarios above.

So, how do you automate a transfer between two non-primary card accounts in a family?

There’s a sneaky trick you can use based on FamZoo’s checklist capability. It combines the scheduling, expiration, and reward/penalty settings of checklist items to create the equivalent of an automated recurring transfer.

Here’s the step-by-step instructions for implementing the first scenario of a daily transfer from a spending card to a savings card.

1. Create a checklist. Look for the Create List link under Checklists. Call the list “Scheduled Transfers” and be sure to tick the checkbox to enable rewards and penalties.
2. Add an item. Click the Add Item link to create an item on the list. Fill in “Daily Savings Transfer” for the description.
3. Set the schedule. Fill in the item’s Due Date field with the date one day prior to the desired first transfer. Then select a Repeats frequency of daily.
4. Set the expiration. Set the item’s Expires setting to 1 day after the due date.
5. Add a credit and a debit upon expiration. In the item’s Rewards and Penalties section, add two entries. One to debit the spending card 10 cents when the item expires, and another to credit the savings card account 10 cents when the item expires. That ends up being the functional equivalent of a 10 cent transfer from spending to savings.

The same recipe can be used to create a recurring transfer between any two family accounts — like the sibling loan repayment in the second scenario.