Is there a way to transfer $100 into a family member's US bank account on a daily basis?

Question

I am trustee for an elderly relative who is not financially competent, and being taken advantage of by a girlfriend. He cannot hold onto money for long, and so I need to periodically provide him small amounts of money from the trust's checking account rather than larger transfers.

I need to transfer $100 to him on a daily basis (so that would be 365 X $100, or $36,500 a year). I'd like that transfer to be automatic (or as automatic as possible), and not require a check or a trip to the bank each day.

This money is for basic living expenses; rent is covered directly by the trust.

This family member is financially irresponsible and cannot hold on to sums greater than about $800. At under $800, it's not worth his girlfriend's time and resulting (temporary) aggravation to steal the money. Over $800, and it's gone. He consistently shares his ATM/PIN, over and over and over again.

How can this be accomplished?

Answer 1

I'm troubled by this: either the person is financially competent, or they are not.

If he's genuinely not financially competent, then I would say the trustee should not be handing them $3000/month and trusting them to pay all their living-expense bills: gas, electric, auto insurance, car payments, etc. The trust should take those over and should own the car. Minimize the number of things the incompetent person needs cash for, to give them far less cash, to "sour the milk" for the soaking girlfriend.

Even grocery or eating-out money can be covered by supplying "gift cards" or retailer (trade) credit cards, e.g. they make Mobil credit cards only good at Mobil stations. He likes Applebees, give them a $100 Applebees gift card every month. If the girlfriend sells the Applebees cards on Craigslist to raise cash, then you have no trouble proving criminal elder abuse.

Now with that done -- to answer your question -- with that $3000/month chopped down to more like $700/month, now weekly or monthly automated transfers make more sense. Those are a lot easier to find, or simply do manually. Monthly or weekly is easy with PayPal, we use it for membership renewals.

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It may also be a good choice for the trust to sell the house and use the proceeds to place him into a quality retirement village/community. Some of them are truly marvelous, and the sale proceeds and the $36,500/year will more than cover the expenses of living in a good one. Once he does, 90% of his daily living expenses are part of membership, and he only needs about $10/day for food to cook, offsite entertainment, etc. Maybe $20/day if he retains a car and needs to buy fuel and is going out more. That should "sour the milk" good-and-plenty for the soaker.

It also means he never has to mow a lawn again or fix a furnace or roof.

The retirement community also helps a lot if the state takes away his driver's license, either because he acted eccentric at a license renewal or got in an accident where senior-itis appeared to be a factor. My parents had to make that transition, and it was almost painless due to the retirement village they chose 11 years prior when they were active seniors. They get by fine on about $300/month.

Answer 2

Have you considered a pull based system rather than a push based system?

• Set up a bank account with the full amount.
• Engineer or such that your relative can only access it via a debit card.
• Set the debit card daily limit to 100USD.
• Profit

EDIT: The OP asked how to deal with irregular unexpected expenses, such as, the beneficiary needing to replace his car tires.

As @Harper notes, the trustee and the trust should handle the large expense, such as his car.

However, that, in certain cases isn't practical. The beneficiary may need a large sum of money for legitimate reasons (e.g. Grandson's birthday gift, a ring to convert the Girlfriend into a Wife etc).

Under the situation, I would give the beneficiary a second (near limitless) debit card, which is linked to an empty bank account. When the beneficiary requires an irregular expense, the following happens.

1. The beneficiary requests additional funds, giving amount claimed, and purpose for the claim.
2. The trustee transfers an amount of money to be made available for the claimed purpose.
3. The beneficiary pays for services/goods detailed in the claim.
4. A receipt is photographed and sent to the trustee via smartphone and instant messaging application of choice.
5. The receipt is recorded and logged into the corporate expense portal.
6. At the end of each calendar month the line manager reviews and approves that month's expenses on the corporate expense portal. Irregularities should be submitted to the compliance department for review. Corrective measures maybe applied if the expense is deemed improper.

Answer 3

Most banks offer inter-bank transfers on a recurring basis, but AFAIK the smallest recurring increment is typically weekly instead of daily. First you should verify that both the trust and beneficiary's accounts allow for at least 31 transfers per month, and if they do, as Hart CO suggested in the question comments, you could likely set up 7 recurring weekly transfers (one for each day of the week) of $100 each.

In the event that the trust doesn't allow for that many transfers per month, you could simply set up an intermediary checking account which receives weekly transfers from the trust, and then does daily transfers to the beneficiary's checking account.

As a side note, your question implies that if the beneficiary receives too much money all at once, his girlfriend might "take the money and run". If that were to happen and she didn't come back, it might be financially worth it in the long run... :)

Answer 4

Could you get the $700/week down to a less tempting figure by paying some significant recurring amounts directly from the trust?

I'm thinking things like utilities, property taxes and services (anything from cleaning to insurance). I'm not in the US, but here they go out monthly/weekly from one of my accounts. I can think of ~$150/week in my case that could easily be paid directly and never touch the vulnerable individual's accounts.

This has the further advantage of protecting his payments to some rather powerful creditors in case the girlfriend cleans the account out just before they're due. It's possible some of this is covered in the rent, but you could look carefully for other possibilities.

Answer 5

As suggested in comments, one good solution may be to have a joint account. Most banks will allow transfers between self-controlled accounts; i.e., I can transfer easily (and recurring, if I want) from my savings to my checking or vice versa.

That joint account wouldn't have to be anything with more than that $100 per day. He also wouldn't have to be an owner of the account; you could probably set him up as an authorized user of the account without being able to control it in any meaningful way (this depends on the bank, but many do). Make sure it doesn't allow overdrafts (probably don't even allow checks, just cash?) and you'll be okay.

Answer 6

Have you considered a secured credit card with a linked checking account? You'd keep full control over the checking and give him the PIN to the credit card only. You may want to investigate whether the credit card + PIN is sufficient to gain access to checking, but assuming it's not, this could be a good solution.

The benefits:

1. Since you are transferring between credit card account and checking account, which are linked, you can make transfers every day. You may need to look into the details for how non-banking day transfers are handled (does the credit card available balance change even though the transfer itself is delayed?)
2. Many banks offer a card whose limit is based on the secured balance. So, that allows saving for a purchase by not spending the daily $100.
3. You can automate/schedule the transfers.
4. You can schedule less periodic transfers from the trust account to the checking account, say monthly trust to checking, to limit the amount that could be taken from the checking should someone social engineer access to it using the secured credit card details.

You'd want to start the account with an initial deposit that acts as a buffer for the time between the date of scheduled transfers from trust accounts and when the checking account is actually credited.

Answer 7

This is a little bit strange but you could use IFTTT (if this then that) and Square Cash to do it:

https://ifttt.com/applets/368267p-send-recurring-square-cash-payments-with-google-calendar-gmail

Answer 8

Everyone's already lectured you, so I think you've had enough of that already.

To answer your question directly:

1. Zelle (formerly clearXchange) should allow instant transfers on weekends.

2. Chase allows automatic weekly transfers via Chase QuickPay (their Zelle).

So it should be possible to automate this by setting up 7 repeating transfers to cover all weekdays.

Caveats:

• I have not tried this. You might trip a flag somewhere.

• I have read stories about Zelle transfers going awry. Do your research.

• The receiver also needs to support Zelle. Currently, only these banks support Zelle:

  • Bank of America
  • BB&T
  • Capital One
  • JPMorgan Chase
  • PNC Bank
  • US Bank
  • SunTrust
  • Wells Fargo

Answer 9

I like Venmo. It's completely free and easy and they don't take a cut. Transfer from any bank account to any bank account.