The person behind the field tests
Who Is D.B. Nomad?
D.B. Nomad is the pen name of a retired information-technology professional who approaches banking from both sides of the screen: as a customer and as a back-end IT guy.
I open real accounts, move real money, connect real institutions, make real payments, and contact support when something breaks. Then I document what happened in plain English.
Experience behind the opinion
Why Should You Care What I Think?
Fair question. I am not some kid fresh out of diapers with a keyboard and internet access.
I spent 38 years in information technology, including 10 years working in the IT department of a credit union. I open real accounts, move real money, connect real institutions, and document what actually happens.
That does not mean I know everything. It means I know where systems break, where policies collide with reality, which questions to ask, and when an explanation does not pass the smell test.
The origin of Digital Banking Nomad
Never Again
I had all of my financial life concentrated in one institution. When it changed the rules and placed new constraints on how I could manage my money, I was left with a choice: bend over and take it—or take my money and do it my way.
Just for fun, they gave me 90 days to comply or operate with a severely degraded account. In the South, we would say it was time to fish or cut bait.
I had about two weeks in the United States before spending the next 45 days in Honduras. Rebuilding my U.S. banking setup—including opening new accounts and obtaining different credit cards—was not an easy feat.
Timing and location mattered. When you apply for an account, automated systems examine far more than the information typed into the application. They may evaluate your location, Internet provider, IP address, device, and other signals intended to confirm that you are who and where you claim to be.
A VPN from overseas is not always enough.
Fortunately, I spent 38 years in information technology. I could securely connect to my computer at home and work through a familiar U.S. device and network. Most people do not have that option, but it was how I managed to rebuild my financial life while living abroad.
Never again.
Today, I maintain relationships with four primary institutions, with backups for each. Every institution has a purpose, and I can move or redirect my financial activity when circumstances change. It is not about collecting accounts. It is about having options.
No single institution will ever control my entire financial life again. I will not be caught flat-footed financially.
That experience forced me to build a banking ecosystem around my life. It also inspired Digital Banking Nomad.
That’s how D.B. Nomad rolls
Plain English—On Purpose
Banking is complicated enough. I explain it simply because useful information should not require a finance degree.
The Gump of IT
For two years, I served as Director of User Services in the United States Coast Guard Auxiliary. During that time, I was honored to help roll out a new PHP-based web platform that worked much like WordPress. I traveled to different cities teaching Auxiliarists how to use it.
Many of the people I taught were older volunteers who were serving their communities, not technical professionals who wanted to learn another complicated computer system. They needed instructions they could understand and use. I took the existing manuals, stripped away the unnecessary complexity, and rewrote them in plain English.
Not everybody appreciated that approach. One person above me hated the simplified manuals and coined a name for what I was doing: I was the Gump of IT. My position was simple: there is no reason to make difficult material harder merely to prove that you know the vocabulary. A reader should not need a dictionary beside the manual just to understand the principle being taught.
Then the people in my classes began coming to me and saying, “You took the words in the manual and made them come alive.” They loved how I taught because they could finally see what the instructions meant and how to use them. Hearing that was one of the greatest honors of my life.
BankCraft uses the same method. Banking is already difficult enough. My job is to make the mechanics understandable without draining the life out of them. Sometimes that requires a story. Sometimes it requires comic relief. Sometimes it even requires the word buttload. The language may not satisfy everybody’s idea of formal financial writing, but if it helps somebody understand the lesson and avoid a costly mistake, it did its job.
If this seems too simple, pull up your big-boy pants and do the field testing yourself. If you would rather learn from the accounts I opened, the money I moved, and the walls I hit, stick around. The information is free. So is the plain English.
Oh, and by the way, a buttload is a real thing! It is a historical English cask unit of liquid volume used for wine. It equals 126 U.S. gallons.[1] Now you know. So use it when appropriate.
Operating philosophy
You’re Fired
Financial institutions are service providers. They do not own my financial life, and they do not get to dictate how I manage it.
If an institution cannot perform the job I need it to perform, I will fire it and take my money elsewhere.
These are my financial assets. I decide where they are held, how they are managed, and which institutions earn the privilege of serving me.
Your money. Your choices. Your power.