Ryan CobblerRelay business banking

Relay gave the tax money its own checking account

Filed Time 3 min read Length 781 words

A row of checkbooks and check registers on a table

For twelve years, every other Friday, a paycheck showed up with the taxes already gone. I never saw the money, so I never missed it. Then I quit HVAC at thirty-eight to build websites, and nobody quit the IRS on my behalf. My first April as a self-employed guy, I opened an envelope with a four-figure bill in it and had about two of those figures sitting anywhere. I remember standing in the kitchen doing long division in my head. There wasn't enough.

So here's the thing. Money with no address gets spent. On a paycheck, taxes live in a place my hands can't reach. Self-employed, they land in the same account as the grocery money and the pawn shop grinder, and they look spendable. The fix took me one year too long to learn, and Carol told it to me in one sentence.

What Carol said

Carol runs Brubaker Tax Service. She's been my tax preparer for three years and my client for two, which makes February at her office an interesting place to stand. She said, "The day a client payment lands, move the tax cut to an account you can't see. Do it automatic, because you'll skip it by May." She gave me my number right there at her counter. I'm not printing her tax math in a blog post. Ask your own preparer for yours, and if you don't have one, that's the Monday problem, not the software.

I set that up in Relay, a business banking app, on the free plan, and I pay nothing for it.

How it's set up

  1. Opened Relay on the Starter plan. $0 a month, no minimum balance, no overdraft fees. A straight sole proprietorship like mine gets up to 10 checking accounts. Regular companies get up to 20. I use three, so either cap is a mansion.
  2. Named the accounts for jobs: TAX, TRUCK, and EQUIPMENT. The tax account is the one that matters.
  3. Set an automatic transfer rule. A cut of every client payment moves to TAX the day it lands, before I've seen it. I cannot talk myself out of a rule.
  4. Left a working balance in the main account for the card and the bills.

The whole bill of materials is $0 a month. Standard ACH transfers are free. An outgoing domestic wire is $8, and I've sent one in three years. The savings side paid 1.19 percent as of September, which is not nothing on the equipment fund. There are paid tiers, Grow at $30 a month and Scale at $90, with higher interest and more accounts. A one-man shop has no business paying either.

The catches, said plain

Relay is not a bank. The sign on the wall belongs to Thread Bank, Member FDIC. Your money sits there, and FDIC coverage comes through their sweep program, which spreads your balance across a network of banks so you can reach up to $3 million of coverage. A small balance just gets the standard $250,000, like any bank.

Now the parts that make me keep a seatbelt on. This summer they froze accounts that hadn't reconfirmed business details by August 31, and the review sites carry plenty of stories about freezes and document demands outside that deadline. Thread Bank, the actual bank underneath, took an FDIC consent order in 2024. That's public record and I'm not going to soften it. Mobile check deposits can hold funds up to seven business days, which is a lifetime when a supplier wants cash.

So the credit union account stays open, with money in it, and I move real balances out of Relay rather than letting the pile grow there. If the app ever locks me out, the tax money is at two addresses, not one. I'm a customer, not a lawyer. If your situation has a wrinkle in it, that's a preparer question.

The breaker panel

A furnace and an air conditioner don't share a circuit. You run separate wires off the panel so one dead part can't take down the whole box. The tax account is its own breaker. April arrived this year with the same four-digit bill, and when it hit, only that breaker tripped. The truck money and the grocery money never flickered. Same house, same income, different wiring. That's the entire product.

What to do Monday

You don't need my app to start this. Open a second checking account at whatever bank you already use, name it TAX, and move one day's worth of income into it before bed. Then ask your preparer what the automatic cut should be. Carol's sentence works at any bank. The account just has to have a name on the door.