When I was single, I could save my duckets with the best of them. In fact prior to marriage and prior to renovating a house I had a really nice chunk of change put away. I've always been a saver and my wife will tell you that I'm obsessed with saving. Obsessed is a strong word and she's probably right because last night, Friday night, my party night, I spent the evening researching online savings accounts that get a better interest rate than my current rate 0.5%. I found this article on Lifehacker which detailed a recent CNN article about online savings accounts with APY as high as 5.15% with no minimum balance (currently I have to have at least $1,000 with my current bank in my savings account). I still haven't decided whether I'll go with ING or with Emigrant Direct. From what I can tell the basic differences are that ING is a little more user friendly and Emigrant Direct has the higher interest rate.
The first thing Miranda asked was if it was safe. From what I could tell, both banks are FDIC insured which is all the assurance that I currently have with my local bank. With a deposit of $3,000 I can earn $150 a month or I could earn $15 a month with my current local bank. These savings accounts are linked to your checking account and you can set it for an automatic deposit into your new savings account. If you need to put some money back into your checking account you simply do an automatic transfer approximately 2 to 4 days before you need the money. This is the biggest inconvenience, not having the money immediately, but that seems to be a really small inconvenience and I'm thinking that I can still keep a minimal amount at my local bank for that very reason.
If anyone can think of a reason why we all shouldn't be doing this then let me know. I've looked around the internet for user opinions and aside from the inconvenience discussed above and a couple of customer service questions, which I really don't care about, so long as I, I mean we, get a higher return on our money and the transfers are through the internet, then bring it on, on. Seriously, the more feedback the better.
Also, Ashley F. asked about printing photos from Flickr and I told her that all you needed was a Yahoo ID. This is not true, you need to sign up for a Flickr account, which is free and I have my settings so that any Flickr user can print photos.
2 comments:
I mentioned this to Brandon and he said that he has accounts that get 4 something (I can't remember) and that the interest on any of these accounts is yearly, not monthly. Just wanted to let you know.
I was going to say the same thing. I would think it's yearly, not monthly. If it was monthly I think we'd all be stupid not to do something like that. But I'm assuming this is kind of like a CD in that sense?
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