My grandmother used to hide a $2 bill (not two $1 bills, but an actual $2 bill) every time she visited my house. Of course, when I found it she’d tell me to put it in my savings account. Now I’ve got about 57 $2 bills that I need to deposit. I want a high interest rate, a very low minimum balance and no fees. After a bit of research, here’s what I found.

Before you go to any bank website, check out an informative and helpful site, BankRate.com (2.3 million people per month – click on the “checking and savings” tab). You’ll learn which banks offer the highest money market / savings account rates across the country.

From there I learned Zion’s Bank is paying the highest rate in the country right now, 5.07% APY with a $1,000 minimum deposit. Not having quite that much cash on hand I found HSBCdirect.com pays 5.05% APY and has a $1 minimum deposit. This is who I ended up opening an account with.

Other banks you may want to consider that pay comparable rates are EmigrantDirect.com (5.00% APY) and CaptialOneDirect.com (5.00% APY). Both have a lot of site traffic, 320,000 and 142,000 people per month respectively.

Lastly, you may have heard of INGDirect.com. While I find their online experience great (and so do a lot of other people – 1.9 million people per month), they no longer pay as competitive of a rate, 4.35% APY.

So, the next time your grandmother decides to teach you a lesson about saving money, tell her you’ve moved on from the piggy bank to an online savings account offering 4-5% APY…with those kinds of rates, she might think twice about hiding $2 bills around the house and open an account of her own!

(Note – rates change on a daily basis. All rates quoted in this article are from 10:45AM ET, Monday July 24, 2006)

Analyze more domains: + +

Done reading? subscribe: To get an automatic feed of all future posts subscribe here, or to receive them via email enter your email address in the box in the right column.

Link to This Post:     

Posted under: Finance - Real Estate - Stocks | Trackback Link | Permalink |