Should I keep most of my banking, credit, and investment accounts at the same bank?
http://www.fdic.gov/deposit/deposits/index.html  FDIC currently insures up to $250,000.  (I would have put that as a comment to Jeffery but it says it was locked.) You don't want to put all your eggs in one basket.  If you shop around, and keep shopping all the time you can keep your accounts in a single place so long as that single place provides the best deal.  Don't have any loyalty to your banking institutions because they don't have any loyalty to you. Also, having lots of accounts means you are familiar with lots of institutions, so you are likely better at shopping around. Things I consider. For fewer institutions: For more institutions: "For personal accounts, I can't imagine that this is too much of a problem.  The only concern that I can think of (for American banks) is that FDIC only insures you up to $100,000 if the bank were to go belly-up.  If you're getting over that amount of money, you may want to ""diversify"" a little more." Here's my answer for what it's worth: I've had all my account with the same bank for all my life. Generally, the disadvantage is that if I want some kind of product like a credit extension or a mortgage, I have the one bank to go to and if they don't want to help me I'm out of luck. However, occasionally there are also perks like the bank spontaneously offering you increased credit or even a whole line of credit. They can do this because they have your whole history and trust you.
Why not just open multiple accounts at the same bank? That would make it harder to lose track of, and you could probably still get reports summarizing the balances across them. I do this and it works well, my credit union even lets me name each account so it is easy to keep them straight. My 0,02€ - I probably live in the same country as you. Stop worrying. The Euro zone has a 100.000€ guaranty deposit. So if any bank should fail, that's the amount you'll receive back. This applies to all bank accounts and deposits. Not to any investments. You should not have more than 100.000€ in any bank. So, lucky you, if you have more than that money, divide between a number of banks. As for the Euro, there might be an inflation, but at this moment the USA and China are in a currency battle that 'benefits' the Euro. Meaning you should not invest in dollars or yuan at this time. Look for undervalued currency to invest in as they should rise against the Euro. "We *are* talking at cross-purposes, but not for the reason you think.   The debt might or might not be legally or practically recoverable (the apple-farmer and everything he owns might have been destroyed in the fire), but the value created and destroyed was real, and so was the money.   You're focusing on the debt owed to the shoemaker, which is fine, but your mistake is thinking that the debt is in some way meaningfully different from money, which it's not.   Most people who try to explain this difference would go off on a spiel about how the overwhelming majority of money on deposit in banks and otherwise in circulation has never been printed, or something, which is okay, but it's not a very convincing argument because you'll come back with something like, ""But I can still withdraw all my money, I can still cash all my checks, etc...""  So instead, I'm going to try and break this down, bear with me...  The apple-grower got a deer (worth 12 loddars, let's set the ""interest"" part aside for the moment). I got a pair shoes (also worth loddars).  Forget about the shoe-maker and the debt for a moment, and focus on me. I sold a deer, and I used the proceeds to buy a pair of shoes.   - Did I defraud anyone? No, I engaged in a fair transaction with willing partners on both sides.   - Did I get paid for the deer? Obviously I did, because I used the payment to buy shoes.   - What did I get paid with, if not money?   I can hear you saying ""yeah, but the shoe guy...""   Forget about the shoe guy. When buy something on Amazon marketplace and charge it on a credit card and then get paid via direct-deposit and then have the money taken from your account to pay off the credit-card company electronically, is all of that real money? Of course it is.   Now, what happens if you die before paying the the credit-card bill? Does that mean that the money Amazon paid to the seller doesn't exist?  Does that mean that money paid by the CC company to Amazon doesn't exist? How about the money in your bank account, does that exist? What if your employer once defrauded someone, how about then?   None of that money has ever been *printed*, nobody got permission from Ben Bernanke to authorize these transactions, but the money that changed hands was absolutely real, even though it was nothing more than a *series of promises.*   Before you argue with me, think this through: all these account-transfers ultimately boil down to *promises* by the end bank to produce cash when and if the account-holder walks up to a teller and demands it. The bank doesn't have nearly enough cash to pay every account-holder, but they *do* have enough (hopefully) to keep their promises, since they know they won't all be called in at once.   Nobody ever actually delivered a package of paper currency to cover these transactions. Everyone is just trading promises, and passing those promises along to others. It sounds crazy to say it that way, but it is *absolutely* true.   Tally up your net worth (or if that's too ugly, imagine tallying up someone's net worth who has a net worth). Chances are that you have never in your life seen that amount of paper cash, certainly not in your physical possession. So who has it? It's not like your local bank branch has a box marked ""C_B_M"" with $400,000 in bills and coins sitting there.   What you have is a series of promises.   When your employer gets by credit-card, the customer promises to pay the credit-card company, who promises to pay your employer's bank. Your employer then pays you with a direct-deposit whereby his bank promises to pay your bank. You then swipe an ATM card and your bank promises to pay the grocery-store's bank, who in turn sends a check to their supplier which is a promise that the grocery-store's bank will pay the supplier's bank, who in turn does the same with the farmer, who does the same with his mortgage-company, who does the same to their investors, who do the same to whoever they spend money with.   Occasionally one of them takes a cash withdrawal to tip the stripper or stick in a birthday-card or buy hot-dogs at the ballpark or something, but overwhelmingly, we are all just spending and re-spending *promises*, and the remarkable thing is that, overwhelmingly, *we keep them*, without anyone involved ever hiring a truck to deliver a bindle of cash to the ""first person"" because there *is* no ""first person.""  All of that stuff is *absolutely real money*.   I used the example of a wildfire, but maybe it will be more useful to think of something that just changes in value for no obvious reason. Think of some article of clothing that has gone out of style-- everyone was buying that stuff up until the day they stopped. Somewhere, someone was stuck with the last warehouse full of hot-pink parachute pants or whatever. A month before, when they were ordered from China or wherever, they were worth $50 each. Now you can't give them away. That value is gone, it's just vanished. The money that bought the pants was real, the pants are real, but they are no longer worth anything.   The person holding that warehouse full of pants now has to *pay* to either store of dispose of them. They might start bouncing checks and breaking promises. There was no fraud, but there also might not be any way to recover the money owed. $10mm worth of parachute pants is now negative $1mm worth of trash that has to be disposed of and mortgage obligations on the warehouse.   I hope some of that makes sense. It is really hard to explain this stuff via analogy and hypothetical and the kinds of terms that lawyers think in, if you will forgive me for saying so." I have the mortgage from Lender A. Can I get a HELOC from Lender B? Yes. Do banks pull my credit to approve a HELOC account? Yes. How is it reported to the credit bureaus and how does it affect my credit (Let's say my limit is $30k and I use all of $30k)?  It is reported as HELOC and the current balance. Similar to credit cards (in fact, some banks report it exactly as credit cards). Anything unique about it's tax deduction? Same as mortgage, except that the limit is $100K unless used for home improvement. Anything else to watch out for? LTV - Loan to Value. This is the ratio of your overall home value to the indebtedness secured by the home. Currently, your LTV is 93% (you have 7% equity). For HELOC, most banks require the LTV, including the HELOC, not to exceed 75%. So the chances you'll get a HELOC are pretty slim. "You probably want to think about pools of money separately if they have separate time horizons or are otherwise not interchangeable. A classic example is your emergency fund (which has a potentially-immediate time horizon) vs. your retirement savings. The emergency fund would be all in cash or very short-term bonds, and would not count in your retirement asset allocation. Since the emergency fund usually has a capped value (a certain amount of money you want to have for emergencies) rather than a percentage of net worth value, this especially makes sense; you have to treat the emergency fund separately or you'd have to keep changing your asset allocation percentages as your net worth rises (hopefully) with respect to the capped emergency amount. Similarly, say you are saving for a car in 3 years; you'd probably invest that money very conservatively. Also, it could not go in tax-deferred retirement accounts, and when you buy the car the account will go to zero. So probably worth treating this separately. On the other hand, say you have some savings in tax-deferred retirement accounts and some in taxable accounts, but in both cases you're expecting to use the money for retirement. In that case, you have the same time horizon and goals, and it can pay to think about the taxable and nontaxable accounts as a whole. In particular you can use ""asset location"" (put less-tax-efficient assets in tax-deferred accounts). In this case maybe you would end up with mostly bonds in the tax-deferred accounts and mostly equities in the taxable accounts, for tax reasons; the asset allocation would only make sense considering all the accounts, since the taxable account would be too equity-heavy and the tax-deferred one too bond-heavy. There can be practical reasons to treat each account separately, too, though. For example if your broker has a convenient automatic rebalancing tool on their website, it probably only works within an account. Treating each account by itself would let you use the automatic rebalancing feature on the website, while a more complicated asset location strategy where you rebalance across multiple accounts might be too hard and in practice you wouldn't get around to it. Getting around to rebalancing could be more important than tax-motivated asset location. You could also take a keep-it-simple attitude: as long as your asset allocation is pretty balanced (say 40% bonds) and includes a cash allocation that would cover emergencies, you could just put all your money in one big portfolio, and think of it as a whole. If you have an emergency, withdraw from the cash allocation and then rebuild it over time; if you have a major purchase, you could redeem some bonds and then rebuild the bond portion over time. (When I say ""over time"" I'm thinking you might start putting new contributions into the now-underallocated assets, or you might dollar-cost-average back into them by selling bits of the now-overallocated assets.) Anyway there's no absolute rule, it depends on what's simple enough to be manageable for you in practice, and what separate shorter-horizon investing goals you have in addition to retirement. You can always make things complex but remember that a simple plan that happens in real life is better than a complex plan you don't keep up with in practice (or a complex plan that takes away from activities you'd enjoy more)." Most people carry a diversity of stock, bond, and commodities in their portfolio.  The ratio and types of these investments should be based on your goals and risk tolerance.  I personally choose to manage mine through mutual funds which combine the three, but ETFs are also becoming popular. As for where you keep your portfolio, it depends on what you're investing for.  If you're investing for retirement you are definitely best to keep as much of your investment as possible in 401k or IRAs (preferably Roth IRAs).  Many advisers suggest contributing as much to your 401k as your company matches, then the rest to IRA, and if you over contribute for the IRA back to the 401k.  You may choose to skip the 401k if you are not comfortable with the choices your company offers in it (such as only investing in company stock). If you are investing for a point closer than retirement and you still want the risk (and reward potential) of stock I would suggest investing in low tax mutual funds, or eating the tax and investing in regular mutual funds.  If you are going to take money out before retirement the penalties of a 401k or IRA make it not worth doing. Technically a savings account isn't investing, but rather a place to store money. I keep several savings accounts. I use an online-only bank that makes it very easy to open a new account in about 2 minutes. I keep the following accounts: Emergency Fund with 2 months of expenses. I pretend this money doesn't even exist. But if something happened that I needed money right away, I can get it. 6 6-month term CDs, with one maturing every month, each with 1 month's worth of expenses. This way, every month, I'll have a CD that matures with the money I would need that month if I lose my job or some other emergency that prevents me from working. You won't make as much interest on the 6-month term, but you'll have cash every month if you need it. Goal-specific accounts: I keep an account that I make a 'car payment' into every month so I'll have a down-payment saved when I'm ready to buy a car, and I'm used to making a payment, so it's not an additional expense if I need a loan. I also keep a vacation account so when it's time to take the family to Disneyland, I know how much I can budget for the trip. General savings: The 'everything else' account. When I just NEED to buy a new LCD TV on Black Friday, that's where I go without touching my emergency funds. Financial advisers like to ask lots of questions and get nitty-gritty about investment objectives, but for the most part this is not well-founded in financial theory.  Investment objectives really boils down to one big question and an addendum.  The big question is how much risk you are willing to tolerate.  This determines your expected return and most characteristics of your portfolio. The addendum is what assets you already have (background risk).  Your portfolio should contain things that hedge that risk and not load up on it.  If you expect to have a fixed income, some extra inflation protection is warranted.  If you have a lot of real estate investing, your portfolio should avoid real estate.  If you work for Google, you should avoid it in your portfolio or perhaps even short it. Given risk tolerance and background risk, financial theory suggests that there is a single best portfolio for you, which is diversified across all available assets in a market-cap-weighted fashion.