Halifax 7% Regular Saver

chimpanzee23

What are your thoughts on this type of savings account

Milarky

It works well enough. You pay in a fixed monthly amount [£25 to £250] each month by standing order and at the end of the year it goes out to your 'nominated' account plus interest- a second Halifax account that you have to open at the same time as the Regular Saver. Then you have an 'empty' Regular Saver and can start all over again.

I'm in the second year - near the end - and I have kept the matured balance in the nominated account - which is a Websaver. This pays 4.65% [which is adequate] and the balance is being steadily reduced by standing order payments back into the RS. Thus I have a 'fixed' amount of capital with Halifax which earns an average of 4.65% and 7% - about 5.9% gross.

My 'standing order' goes out of the Websaver to a Halifax current account on the 1st of each month and moves straight from there into the RS by a second 'standing order' on the same date. Complicated, but the only way I could get seamless payments from the Websaver to the RS with no days lost interest.

Other posters have reported that you don't actually need a Halifax current account to accomplish this if you phone them up and ask them to set up a direct standing order from the Websaver [Their online facility won't let you do this yourself for some reason]

System

Mine is great. It goes straight of my websaver each month and into the savings account, at the end of the 12 months it empties back into the websaver so you can keep funding it. Great account for very little work (although setting it up was a pain in the backside as the counter staff were very disorganised). I am on my second year of funding it.

Kazza242

I have one of these savings accounts. They are good for savers who can manage to keep up the monthly deposits without making a withdrawal. I use mine to fund my mini cash isa each year, as it matures in early April.

To get the best out of this account, you really do need to be able to leave the money to build up without being tempted to withdraw some of it. If you are tempted to make a withdrawal this will significantly reduce the interest rate you will earn from the account.

tomstickland

I've got a similar account paying 10% with A&L. It's a great idea and should net me around 7.5% before tax (average of 5 and 10%). I'm considering opening the Halifax one too.

kenshaz

Limited,no -one is going to make a fortune ,only Halifax,nothing special,you could make more money Tarting

tomstickland

It's fine if you want to maximise the interest on totally safe savings though.

kenshaz

Ok cannot argue with that

YorkshireBoy

Milarky wrote:

...phone them up and ask them to set up a direct standing order from the Websaver [Their online facility won't let you do this yourself for some reason]

Judi wrote:

Mine is great. It goes straight of my websaver each month and into the savings account, at the end of the 12 months it empties back into the websaver so you can keep funding it.

I'm looking into these accounts at the moment, but I'm confused because your statements seem to conflict with the account T&C's which state...

One payment each month by standing order from £25 up to £250. No standing orders from other Halifax savings accounts.

Am I missing something?

Tim_L

The benefit of regular savers is that they create a savings habit.

However the amounts you are allowed to put in are so small in relative terms that the difference in what you actually gain from what you can get on a standard instant access account is pretty negligible. If you are allowed £250 a month then you're making about £50 a year extra going from 5% to 10% after tax and these accounts don't compound year on year at the headline interest rate. Probably worth having if you're sure you can fully fund them every month, and of course you may have several of these open, but these are really loss leaders to pull customers into other products. To put this in perspective, a tiny percentage reduction in your weekly spend (save the cost of a pint of beer or a couple of packs of sandwiches for example) will return much more.

It's very easy to get seduced by the headline interest rate - which of course is why these rates exist - but there are a lot of other things you can do with £250 a month which are worth considering, one of which is drip feeding some other form of investment.

tomstickland

Personally I use a reg saver because I have a few K of savings which I don't want to expose to investment risk, so I see my primary management aim to get all of the savings at the highest rate possible. If that makes me £150 extra over the year then that's great.

Back to the saving money elsewhere, I've pondered this a lot. I worked out that I'm making just over £1 per day in interest. So if I buy a bottle of water for 60p per day I'm undoing 60% of my daily interest. But it's not quite like that. The money in the savings is money that I have already saved.