Alliance and Leicester 12% Savings Account!

euang

A&L have a savings account called Premier Regular Saver linked to their Premier Current Account where you can earn 12% interest on amounts from £0 - £3000 in a year. The money cannot be withdrawn during the year unless you clsoe the account and you have to commit to depositing a minimum of £10 - max of £250 per month and it must come from an Alliance and Leicester Premium Current Account. Offer only open to new customers. I just opened a Premier Direct Current Account to take advantage of the £25 recommend a friend offer then realsied afterwards about the high interest savings account. The bonus is this current account still lets you do the recommend a friend! Have phoned up and checked and if you have just registered for the Premier Direct Current aSccount you can swap to the Premier Current Account and then get the Premier Regular Saver current account. Interest is added after a year so you must keep the money going in. I was going to put £50 aside into an ISA but this looks much better. Aneven better idea is if you can't afford to put £250 quid into the account each month get your friends and family involved and get them to give you their money so you can invest it for them. At the end of the year they get their cash back with interest! Obviously a bit of trust required and financial commitement to putitng in the same amount each month. I'm checking the small print and it looks like you have to stick to the same amount of money going into the account each month and you can't change it, so if you start putting £50 in the first month you have to do that for each subsequent month for the rest of the year.

This then can help you make the minimum deposit required for the premier current account, I was orginially going to transfer £500 into the premier account and then transfer it straight back to me, this way I'll hopefully put in £300 of my own money, £200 of my friends and family and then transfer £250 back to me and plop £250 into the Savings account.

It looks pretty good to me and am going to do it, but if anyone has any comments or warnings about it please let me know!

Ta

Euan

masonic

The only warning I have is you only have about 2 weeks to get the regular saver open before that account is withdrawn.

euang

Hi thanks,

Yeah just found out they're stopping it on 7th Feb. Have got accepted for the Current Account, just got to wait for the account details...

Cheers

Euan

euang

It's 12% Gross p/a as well so works out to be Net 9.6 % at lower rate of income tax

euang

On further investigation this isn't as great as it sounds. The interest is calculated daily and as you don't start off with £3000 the only money getting calculated at 9.6% is £250. In effect you get a net interest rate of about 5% . I suppose the benefit is you don't need to put in £3000 for the full year. Thought it was too good to be true!

masonic

euang wrote:

Thought it was too good to be true!

Were you really expecting to earn interest on money that wasn't in the account?

euang

I got carried away with seeing the 12% offer. Didn't really appreciate that there was only going to be a maximum amount of £250 to start with and the same each month. Good marketing on A&L's part! I wasn't quite sure about it to be honest and thought it wasn't quite right but just hadn't figured out how. Silly mistake to make but glad I realised.

Euan

realaledrinker

You aren't the only one to be confused by this, The "agony aunt" of the Sunday Telegraph had to eat humble pie in her column today as she had fallen for the exact same error, complaining that the account "only" returned 6%ish and not 12%!!