A guide to getting the most out of your checking and savings accounts

Nowadays, local banks may not be the best places for anyone to keep their money. I have currently 8 bank acccounts, a mix of checking and savings accounts across various institutions. Today I’d like to let my fellow colleagues know about the various checking and saving accounts that you can put your liquid money in. The basic liquid accounts that you can keep on hand include

1. Savings account
2. checking account
3. money market account - basically a different kind of savings account

These are the major institutions that I found to have the best rates and the best either customer service or interface on the web. The drawback of a non local bank is that you don’t have physical presence of the bank to do business. To get around that, I also have an account with a local bank and deposit to that bank and transfer money from there to my online bank.

In general, I don’t do CDs because you don’t get much more for the inconvenience of locking your money up in a CD.

1. Am Trust Direct: This bank offers 5.35% with a 1 thousand minimum. I keep my emergency money in this account. And is the highest one rated after FBNO direct which has a current limited promotion of 6%. The interface is not as good and i had some issues with logging in but overall, I’ve been getting enough return that I find the few inconveniences alright especially given that I don’t use this account on a regular basis.

2. Etrade Savings - currently they have 5.05 % interest on their savings account. The reason why I like their setup is because it is so easy to transfer money from Etrade Savings to other accounts in the Etrade family of accounts and other accounts.

3. Etrade Checking - They have a >3% interest on the money in their checking which is better than even some savings accounts out there. They gave me a set of checks for free and online billpay is also available. The only issue is that you need to do direct deposit to not have to deal with monthly charges or keep 5000 dollars in the account on a 30 day average.

4. HSBC Direct - I had a lot of my money in their savings account which at the time had a 6% promotion. Now its a 5.05 % and honestly, I didn’t like their computer format at all. It was also bothersome that it took longer than other banks to transfer money so my money was in limbo for longer periods when i transferred money from one bank to another bank.

5. ING Direct: I’ve been hearing some really great reviews about ING direct and they actually have the majority share of online bankers so they must be doing something right. They offer a nice 4.50 % APY with no minimums or fees so its pretty convenient. I have a link at the bottom if you want to sign up with them.

6. Bank of America- I also signed up for their checking account because they were offering 100 dollars to open myfreechecking which is free if you have direct deposit. I don’t like this company at all because you actually have to order checks to use the account. Another thing that I don’t like about this account is that they actually charge you if you want to transfer money out of the account into another account that isn’t a bank of america account. So I have the 100 dollar bonus but I can’t get the money out because I don’t want to order checks and I don’t want to pay money to transfer the money out of the account.

There are a bunch of other deals that I wanted to mention however you can get a more complete list at bankdeals

* get 100 dollars when you open a chase free checking account. If you have a local chase bank, this may be a great deal: this expires 8/31/07 so act now. However, I would still open a online savings account like ING direct to get the best interest rates.

So how does this apply to you and me? Bottom line: open a local bank, do online banking. –> then open an online savings/checking account and connect the two accounts. Place most of your money in the account with the highest interest rate. In the end, you will come out ahead a few extra hundreds of dollars a year from interest which I think is a pretty good deal for just a couple of hours of work opening your various liquid savings/checking accounts.

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