I came across an old Savings Account of mine the other day...

kolin_2

And unfortunately, i'm not a millionaire , theres no hidden cash (save £5.77), BUT. it's a Halifax Liquid Gold account, i've not used it since about 1996/7 ?, according to the Halifax site, it's got an AER of 0.1%?

what does this refer to, is this account basically just a place to dump cash, and not get any form of interest on it?

Lokolo

You do get interest. Just so little its not worth having the account.

It may have had a decent interest amount years and years ago, but rates change. And usually the older the account, the lower the interest rate.

kolin_2

Excellent, I take it then that they use this kind of thing to force people into using other accounts? I had £1000 i was going to put in it, by might as well close it and put it in another/new savings account....

Lokolo

kolin wrote: »

Excellent, I take it then that they use this kind of thing to force people into using other accounts? I had £1000 i was going to put in it, by might as well close it and put it in another/new savings account....

Yes you may.

And no they don't do it to force people to use other accounts, they do it because people don't keep an eye on the interest rate, leave loads of money in it still, then the bank have free money without having to get anything back.

kingmonkey

They borrow your money for 0.1% and then lend money for 8.9% and make 8.8% profit with YOUR money.

alanq

Liquid Gold never had a high rate of interest but it didn't used to be quite so miserly.

Banks want people to use internet and telephone banking or failing that to serve themselves at an ATM using a plastic card. They don't want the costs of employing staff to carry out often small transactions with passbooks however much that might suit some of their customers. Having said that the some non-passbook account aren't very generous either.