The holidays bring a flood of financial wellness advice. Budget for holiday spending. Resist impulse purchases. Set savings goals for the new year. Track every dollar.
All of it assumes one thing: The money you save will actually be there when you need it.
That assumption is increasingly wrong.
The financial wellness industry—banks, fintech apps, budgeting platforms, savings tools—has trained you to focus on wealth accumulation and financial discipline. Build your emergency fund. Automate your savings. Cut unnecessary subscriptions. Track every transaction.
These habits matter, but they address only part of the equation. The most important part—the one that many platforms would prefer you ignore—is whether your savings are actually secure from cyber criminals who target holiday shoppers with sophisticated fraud attacks.
Why the holidays intensify the fraud equation
November and December aren’t just the highest spending months. They’re also peak fraud season, and the timing is deliberate.
You’re making more transactions than usual. You’re shopping online, buying digital gift cards, making charitable donations, using payment apps to split holiday family meals. Each transaction creates potential exposure at a time when criminals know your attention is more divided than usual. When you’re excited to spend time with loved ones and use the money you saved up all year to get them that special thing they wanted, criminals are even more excited, and for a far more sinister reason: It’s easier than ever to steal your money.
Phishing emails designed to look like shipping notifications. Fake charity appeals. Text messages claiming failed delivery attempts. These scams peak during the holidays because they work—people expect legitimate messages from retailers, banks and delivery services, making it harder to distinguish what’s real and what’s fake.
Your bank’s fraud detection systems struggle during this period, too. The increased transaction volume from legitimate holiday spending makes it harder to flag unusual activity. What looks suspicious in July might look normal in December.
What the financial wellness industry won’t tell you
While budgeting platforms, savings apps and other financial wellness tools encourage you to save, they’re protecting those savings with the same security architecture that has catastrophically failed across every other digital platform. They require passwords that can be stolen, send text codes that can be intercepted through SIM swapping and provide authentication methods that criminals defeat thousands of times daily.
This isn’t an oversight. It’s the business model. Banks compete on features, rates and convenience—rarely security. Acknowledging security vulnerabilities would undermine the frictionless experience they’ve spent billions marketing.
The missing part of the equation
Real financial wellness requires three components:
- Building savings: Most banks handle this reasonably well. Competitive interest rates, automated deposits, compound growth. The mechanics of accumulation work.
- Staying disciplined: This is where financial wellness programs focus: budgeting tools, spending alerts, educational content about resisting impulse purchases.
- Keeping it secure: This is where traditional banking fails catastrophically. The same bank that helps you diligently save could also precariously protect your accumulated funds with authentication methods that criminals bypass routinely. Do your own due diligence and ask your bank about its fraud protection procedures.
Most financial wellness advice addresses the first two while treating the third as someone else’s problem. But criminals targeting your savings don’t care how disciplined your budget is. They care whether your bank’s security can actually stop them—or slow them down at the very least.
Fraud losses erase months or years of disciplined saving in minutes. A $50,000 emergency fund built through years of automated $200 monthly deposits vanishes in a single unauthorized transfer, never to be seen again. Your financial wellness program celebrates your consistency. Criminals see opportunity in routine and vulnerability.
A different approach to the protection problem
Fort Knox high-security savings accounts exist specifically because traditional banks can’t solve this problem. When instant transfers and frictionless convenience are their competitive advantages, they can’t also offer the security that actually protects savings.
Fort Knox makes a different tradeoff: Less convenience, more security. Your checking account handles daily transactions with normal speed and accessibility. Your Fort Knox account handles your life’s savings—emergency funds, down payments, retirement reserves—with security architecture built to withstand the attacks that compromise traditional banking.
The approach isn’t incremental improvements to password security. It’s closed-loop architecture that isolates your savings to prevent unauthorized destinations, mandatory delays that give you time to catch fraud and identity verification that doesn’t rely on digital methods like one-time codes. You can read about the specific security features in our previous posts about passwords, authentication and account takeover protection.
The real financial wellness question
Financial wellness programs teach you to ask: “Am I saving enough?” and “Am I spending wisely?”
The question they avoid: “Will my savings actually be there when I need them?”
That’s not pessimism. That’s acknowledging that sophisticated scams like account takeover fraud continue to accelerate. The security architecture protecting most savings accounts hasn’t fundamentally changed in decades.
Your financial wellness depends on protection, not just accumulation and discipline. This holiday season, while everyone else is focused on spending less, maybe the more important question is whether your bank is doing enough to keep your savings secure.
Because the best budget in the world doesn’t matter if criminals can drain your money faster than you can save it.
