I can throw in my 2 cents here as a Schwab customer.
Schwab will let you buy CDs at any bank via a brokerage account linked to your checking or savings. Basically, they'll transfer the money to whatever bank has the CD you want, and transfer it back to you with the interest at expiration. Ditto for T bills. It's an excellent product to increase yield without taking on default risk
PayPal Cash Plus has a ton of features, but there's lots of fees [1][2]. You earn no interest. It's not a good deal, other than it being familiar.
Square Cash, now known as the 'Cash' app, is a strange hybrid of a P2P payment network and a spendable balance that gives a debit card and you can direct deposit into. You earn no interest. It's odd. It targets a hip young consumer who wants ease and convenience and doesn't know any better. It has... some... virtues? Just not ones that make it worthwhile to use it instead of some rival that earns interest.
Depending on your exact use-case, it will vary which one of these is ripoff-tier and which one is so-so. I have a low opinion on nickel-and-diming fees for convenience features, so I find the PayPal Cash Plus offering the most grievous. Square Cash just has a weird use-case that isn't my use-case.
Thanks. I use Square Cash to pay the cleaning lady on occasion, so I guess that's one use case. I suppose if I kept more of a balance I would look into interest rates and all of that
I use Schwab investor checking. I love the free ATMs and saving on international fees. BUT it does not give any meaningful interest on balance and it's hard to get cash.
I do LOVE the support. Compared to my other bank's Visa card it's completely different support and Schwab is hands down way better. It feels like 'wealthy important person' support lol
I also use Wealthfront and Robinhood and recently put a small amount of cash into Wealthfront's high interest cash account. The problem is there is no card or similar spending functionality, and Treasuries seem to pay slightly more and similar time to 'liquid usable cash'
New ones: Square Cash [4], PayPal Cash Plus [5], SoFi Money [6], Aspiration [7], Simple [8], unreleased and cancelled Robinhood product [9].
These couldn't be more different: one is ripoff-tier, one is so-so, while the rest are pretty good.
[1] https://www.schwab.com/public/schwab/investing/accounts_prod... [2] https://www.fidelity.com/cash-management/fidelity-cash-manag... [3] https://www.investmentnews.com/article/20190304/FREE/1903099... [4] https://squareup.com/us/en/legal/cash-ua [5] https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/ua/legalhub-full [6] https://www.sofi.com/faq/#money [7] https://www.aspiration.com/get-account [8] https://www.simple.com/help/articles/goals/protected-goals [9] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/robinhood-quietly-stops-us...