I’m proud of myself today. I’ve been lamenting the fact that my bank doesn’t offer a service like Bank of America’s Keep the Change program. For those that don’t want to read, they will automatically round up your check card transactions and deposit the change into your savings account.

Today, at lunch, I realized that I could easily write a script to do this myself.

So I did.

The script is pretty simple. It piggybacks off of my nightly expensr import. That script archives a Quicken export of the previous day’s transactions. The “keep the change” script parses that Quicken file and totals up the amount of change from each transaction. It then uses the perl module WWW::Mechanize to securely log into my bank’s website and initiate a transfer from my checking account to my savings account.

Safeguards are built in to prevent any transfers that are inordinately large for a single day ($10, just to give myself a decent margin of error). It will also prevent any transfers if my balance is under a certain amount, or if, for some reason, the amount to transfer is larger than my available balance.

The only feature that isn’t present here is the initial savings matching that Bank of America provides. Still, it’s not bad for an hour of work.

If anyone uses Navy Federal Credit Union and wants a copy of the script for themselves, email me at jrsmith [AT] gmail [DAUGHT] com. It could probably be adapted for other banks, but I’m lazy.