Where can i put money for savings that has a better interest rate than savings? I feel like i just got trampled by a big, fat Lamesaurus Rex called Wachovia Premium Savings. I close one checking account, and transferred money from another checking into savings and i had exactly $5000 in there. I have eagerly been waiting for April 1st to see what my interest would be.
I got 50 cents.
50 cents interest from 5 thousand dollars. I just heard the lamesaurus rex roar in my head againt. Where can i put my $5000.50 where it might get, say, $12 interest next time?
And, is it normal to feel like Wachovia’s executives are laughing at me?
Check out this thread over at FatWallet.com. The Premium Savings is paying practically nothing - I checked and it said it would pay an APY of .15% on $0-9999.99. You can do 20 times that at e-trade.
I’m sure Wachovia is giving you a terrible rate on your savings account with them but you seem to have omitted a key data point - how long you had $5000.00 in the account. It’s not really fair to bemoan the 50 cents if you only had the $5,000 balance for a few days. If you left the money in for a full month, 50 cents would represent a 0.12% APY, so I suspect it was less than a month. Incidentally, interest rates are not best determined experientially. Contrarily, you should go to your local branch or call up and find out what it is.
I’ve used INGDirect for years. I’m sure someone offers a higher rate, but I don`t keep much money in my savings account and I’m not interested in switching often. Their orange savings account currently offers at 3% APY, which is ever so slightly above the 2.918% APY you need to earn your coveted $12 per month
Sure it does. Without logging in I can see that they offer 3%.
After logging in I can see that my savings account had between $6800 and $7022 in it during the month of march and I recived $18 in interest.
ETA I also see that I was friggen paying attention and my CD was apperently set to auto renew after 6 months at which point in renewed at the new wonderful rate of 2.75%. Yup, I’ve got a CD with a lower rate then my savings account. :smack:
:: re-checks site, but this time turns on Javascript ::
Ah, there it is. (why the heck would you need Javascript to display something as simple as that? Arrgghh.)
If you need the money to be liquid, you don’t have many options. While the feds’ lowering the interest rate again is good for people borrowing money, it isn’t so good for people saving money.
We have most of our non-liquid savings tied up in stocks, etc. Our liquid accounts bear little to no interest (checking account/savings accounts at the bank and money market account for our semi-liquid savings held in our brokerage account.) CD rates are terrible.
If you have any credit card debt, you’d be wise to pay that off as you’ll not beat that interest rate by saving it. If you don’t, I don’t know. Have you considered stuffing it in your mattress? You might find 75 cents when you flip the mattress, which will beat your current rate by 50%!!
There was just over $4300 in there as of last month. When i transferred extra funds from checking i made it exactly $5000 on March 27th. I had assumed that since interest only happens at the start of the month that it would take into account whatever was in there on the last day. Is it actually calculated every day, and not just totaled at the end?
Wachovia calculates interest on savings accounts daily and credits the amount monthly. So they calculate an effective daily interest rate based on the annual percentage yield they offer and you earn that much interest per day. http://wachovia.com/personal/page/0,,657_2167^12662,00.html#61
For my area the APY on a premium savings account for less than $10,000 is 0.15%. That’s really awful and you should definitely switch. A few other people recommended ING direct and they’ve been great for me. When I call in for service, I never have to punch a bunch of numbers into the phone - I just go right to a person. I love that. 3% is a pretty good rate now, but you can do a little better if you`re inclined to search around.
I’m no banker (and I’m Canadian, not American if that makes a difference), but I thought most savings accounts these days were daily interest (but credited monthly), so you get interest based on how long the money was in there. In any case, back before daily interest accounts were common I seem to recall that you got interest based on your minimum balance for the month. I’d be quite surprised if any bank paid interest according to your method.
On the other hand, if you want to safely earn 100% APY interest in a Wachovia Savings Account, just open with the minimum $100 balance using their $50 new customer offer. Close your account in 6 months. Worked for me so far with Citibank, Wachovia, and Wells Fargo. You do need a bit of patience and organization, though.
No, we offer those all the time because most people are too lazy to keep moving their from bank to bank. Bankers can usually only see the last 60 days of your transactions without doing extra research so unless you are especially memorable or you mention it they’ll never know. If they do somehow find out (and it wouldn’t surprise me if they developed a way to in the future) the worst that they would do is charge you a penalty for closing the account out early (early usually = 90 days) on top of the bonus.
Aside from that you don’t have to worry.
Regarding the OP it depends on how long you can go without using the money. I would recommend an online Money Market or savings account. Otherwise if you’re looking long term go through www.bankrate.com and search for the best CD yields. As long as the bank is FDIC insured you can rest easy calling them and making arrangements to open it over phone, fax or internet. Even with awful interest rates you can still get CD’s at or above 5% if you look hard enough.
I have an HSBC account. It’s paying 3.03% right now. When I opened it it was 4.75%, IIRC. Whenever the Fed cuts interests rates to “stimulate the economy” what people sometimes forget is that it also means savings accounts interest also gets cut.
I really don’t understand why anyone would care about the savings rate. First of all, the $50 bonus for new customers obliterates the tiny difference between 3%, 1%, 5%. Second, if you have any substantial amount of money to invest, it should not be sitting in a savings account. Mutual funds, bonds, CDs, etc. are all much better investments, depending on your timeframe. If you have more than a thousand dollars in savings, you might want to look into a money market account.
Ok, so other than the fact that I am sitting smack dab in the middle of Indiana, what is stopping me from opening an account in Australia? My $1000 USD turns into $1689 AUD and then I start drawing 6.9% interest instead of 2.7% (with my current bank)? I’m not real sure how the whole compound interest works but just looking at the numbers it looks like an extra 4.2% or $42 USD per year just for piddling around online and writing a few letters. What am I not seeing?
USD 1,000 is more like AUD 1,080 at the moment: I wish it were AUD 600 more than that, but it’s not.
Yes, there’s no problem (at least for the big players) with moving your money to a country with higher interest rates; and part of the reason why a country like Australia might have higher interest rates might be to attract money into the country.
However, nothing is risk-free, and in this case the risk is that, while you might get x% extra in interest, you might lose that and even more in currency fluctuations. In recent times, the AUD has been going up against the USD, but there is no guarantee that this trend will continue.
This I say, this is why I don’t play the currency game.
That, plus, now I’m wondering what constitutes “Austrailian Resident”. Perhaps I could get a P.O. Box for under $42 per year and still pull in a profit, as well as a boatload of coupons for vegemite or Ginger beer or something.
I don’t know what the forwarding fee from the AU P.O. Box to the states would be, but again, if the whole package came in under $42 USD I’d be golden.
