Savings aren’t for the weekly groceries.

Just about everyone that deals with a bank maintains both a checking account and a savings account. Or at least you should have both. Anyway, while they may just seem like two different houses for your money to live in, a savings account is fundamentally different from a checking account, not just in its symbolic purposes, but its potential monetary restrictions.

Many banks manage savings accounts with a special set of rules that aren’t applied to checking accounts. For example, with a checking account, you can go to a bank branch or ATM and withdraw as much cash as you want, as many times as you want, with no fees or penalties (unless you’re using a non-network ATM, of course). With savings accounts, banks often place limits on the number of withdraws you can make from them per month, with the usual number hovering somewhere around six.

If you make more withdrawals from your savings than your bank permits, you’ll be hit with a fee. If you make a habit of exceeding your limit on a regular basis, your bank might just convert the account over to a checking account, or otherwise transfer the money out of it over to your existing checking and close the account altogether. There’s some legal jargon for why this is why it is, but the short version is that it’s a pain for banks if you treat your savings account like a checking account, so don’t do that.

Even if those fees weren’t there, you still shouldn’t draw from your savings unless you’re in a financial emergency. The whole point of a savings account is to stash money away for later in life and, in the case of high-yield savings accounts, give it time to mature into something a little more valuable. If you’re just going to keep treating your savings account like a second wallet, then why did you even open it?