<prompt> Human: Sometime in the next few years me and my friend are planning to go on a trip to Europe, so Im going to be saving quite a bit of money every paycheck. A few hundred dollars at least.Should I just keep the money in my existing savings account or should I make a separate one just for this specific reason? I feel like if its in a separate account, ill be able to see exactly how much I have, also I wont even touch it until im going to use it.  <response>: My SO and I do this for vacations and Christmas or gifts money. We have our regular checking and saving accounts at a local bank, but then we have a completely separate checking account at a local credit union. Depending on how much were trying to save, we move 50 - 100 each pay into that account. The benefit of using a credit union lets us keep that account active so we can compare loan rates between our back and the CU. But the other benefit for using a separate account at a separate bank is when traveling, if your debit card information is stolen, its not stolen from our primary account. We had that happen once on a road trip to Maine gas station skimmer and it was no big deal to go through the CU to get the charges corrected while still having access to our primary and separate checking at our bank.I think it helps us to know the CU money is only for special things. Its a good feeling to know that when theres a birthday or a holiday, we dont have to worry about trying to budget extra money because its already there. YMMV but we do like having a separate account at a separate location. If you do go for a second account, check out what others have said, and maybe find one that has a deposit bonus for X amount of initial dollars for opening a new account. 