Using only 1 bank account? Act now to secure your money

How many bank accounts do you have? Are you using just one bank account for everything? If you are having only one bank account or if you are not managing your bank accounts smartly, read this and act now, to safeguard yourself from possible scams and frauds.

Background- Why having only 1 bank account is risky:

1. FastTag is linked to your bank account and can deduct money without two factor authentication. Anyone can buy an RFID reader and there's a fraud waiting to happen
2. Google Pay and other wallets are linked to your bank account and can credit/debit instantly.  If you don't pay attention, there're scamsters waiting to trick you to pay them instead of you receiving money.
3. You would shared your bank account number with various friends/business contacts to receive money.
4. We read about several frauds where scamsters change customer care numbers of reputed companies on Google, when people call trick them into sharing their bank details and siphon off money.
5. God forbid some banks may collapse overnight or put restrictions on withdrawal (ask PMC Bank customers)
6. You could be held at gun point/knife point by robbers and might be forced to give your ATM card and PIN

"Never put all your eggs in one basket" is an age old saving when it comes to managing money. Usually this was referring to your investments like stocks and mutual funds. But now, the same needs to be said about bank accounts. If you are using just one bank account for keeping all your money and linking it to all apps and transactions, you are inviting unnecessary risk. Despite being careful, there is a high risk of someone somewhere managing to gain access to your account and take away your money. Recovery if at all possible will be a lengthy process.

Prevention is better than cure.

So what to do?

• Step 1: Have two bank accounts, preferably in two separate banks
• Step 2: Keep one account as your main account- where you keep most of your money. Let us say you have 2 lakh rupees in your savings account. Let that money be in this account. Do not link this account to any apps, do not share account number with anyone, leave ATM Card at home, do not install bank's app.
• Step 3: Transfer 10-20% of your money to your second account- say 20000-40000 INR
• Step 4: Use this second account for all app linking (FastTag, G-Pay etc). Share this account with friends and others to send/receive money. If this account runs out of money transfer from main account using net banking

Advantages:
Even if your account is compromised, max money you lose will be a small amount and won't bankrupt you. With majority money safe elsewhere, your risk and headache will be that much lesser

It is very unlikely that you will need all your money at once. A smaller amount is  adequate for day to day needs. No need to expose entire money to others.

If you sense any trouble or possibility of risk, you can withdraw all the money in one shot and close the account to prevent further unauthorized transactions.

Same goes for credit card transactions. Get a secondary card with much lesser limit, use that for online transactions.

This model will be a bit inconvenient if you have to do large value transaction- it is not everyday we do transactions in huge amount-we will have time to transfer required amount from main account to second account on need basis and then perform the transaction.

Similar: Experience dealing with credit card fraud * ATM Fraud * Mobile Banking apps- suggested features * How CRED makes money? *