Help! confused by all the differnert savings accounts

fishdish

Can anyone offer advice please. I have £20000.00 which I need to save. I do not want to tie it up in a long term bond(which I cannot access). This is because I am now in my early [EMAIL="60'@s"]60's[/EMAIL] and never know when I might need it.
:think:

xylophone

http://www.money.co.uk/savings-accounts.htm

Gromitt

Your going to need the entire 20K or can afford to lock some of it away, even if its only 1K ?

Do you have ISAs?

Lith

Gromitt wrote: »

Your going to need the entire 20K or can afford to lock some of it away, even if its only 1K ?

Do you have ISAs?

Can't have more than 1 isa can ya? with different banks??

innovate

Lith wrote: »

Can't have more than 1 isa can ya? with different banks??

Sure you can have more than 1 ISA, even with the same bank.

You can open a new ISA, and pay into it, each new tax year.

You can even have 2 ISAs each tax year - one cash, and one S&S one.

So you could have 12 ISAs from the last 6 years.

In reality, you'd probably have transferred and combined some or all of them. But once you get near £85K in a single cash ISA, you'd definitely want to split it into at least 2, to stay within the FSCS protection.

Anthorn

fishdish wrote: »

Can anyone offer advice please. I have £20000.00 which I need to save. I do not want to tie it up in a long term bond(which I cannot access). This is because I am now in my early 60's and never know when I might need it.
:think:

I'm in my early 60's too and I understand the need to be able to access your money. You could put your full allowance for the tax year into a 1 or 2 year cash ISA to get the interest tax free and still be left with over £14,000. Some ISAs allow instant withdrawals with a penalty of an interest deduction.

For the rest you need to decide how much you are likely to need at short notice and put that into an instant access savings account and the rest into a short-term savings account. If you don't mind changing banks every year savings accounts with a bonus that lasts a year will give you more interest. If you want the accounts long-term then choose an account which doesn't have a bonus. Newcastle building society offers a reasonable interest rate without bonus.

That's my take on it anyway.