MSE News: Savvy MoneySaver plays bank system to make £1,000s

redkenny

If he's so savy then why is he only earning 1.25% on savings when you can get 3% with a 123 account with the same bank and save money on bills at the same time.
The article or this guy has also missed out on the 6% nationwide regular saver, the 6% on hsbc current account on balances up to 2500. The £100 Halifax opening bonus. Santander £300 opening bonus (if you happened to have one of their mortgages). 4.25% flexclusive ISA.

In fact I think I've done a lot better than this guy over the last two years, but it still doesn't add up to £1000s.
Borrowing money on 0% credit cards etc. to increase the ammount of deposit I had for my mortgage and get a better rate has saved me a lot more than all the faffing around I did with bank accounts.

Dogger69

Perhaps Amy could provide a breakdown of how she gets to the 'thousands' figure? I'm not even seeing one thousand, let alone multiples of.

chanz4

oh dear this news is like the suns, over inflated. Most on this site already do this and if was savy would have x1 joint and x1 single halifax and then use a lloyds vantage acc

richardw

Carp article, blatantly promoting links to make moneysupermarket more money, something Martin S Lewis should've edited into the bin.

MoneySaverLog

All sounds very familiar would not touch Santander though. Lol ;-)

Herbalus

Dogger69 wrote: »

Perhaps Amy could provide a breakdown of how she gets to the 'thousands' figure? I'm not even seeing one thousand, let alone multiples of.

Apart from the distinction between 'making' money and 'not spending/cashback/saving/interest' money, the article doesn't do a lot wrong. The £1000 figure mark comes from "hundreds each year", which is later qualified as £500 each year. After 4 years that becomes thousands, or more specifically, about two of these £1,000s.

Though I agree with most: the chap doesn't have a particularly complicated set up and the 1.25% eSaver does not give the best return, but it could be that he's just not the type to bother with 4 Halifax Rewards, 4 Vantage accounts, a joint First Direct Account to get another Regular Saver, and a 123 account. He's fairly new to all this.

I find the main part of this website is for people who are new to all this. Check the forums for the people who have this 'amazing new brainwave' of opening a Halifax Reward for £5 a month, leaving it empty and transferring money in and out on the same day, but aren't sure for some reason if they're allowed to. It doesn't hurt to have a review of the basics, because many people won't be aware that they can do that.

Former_MSE_Andrea

Thank you Herbalus

Many of you replying have been using the site and forum for a long time so for you this is second nature and probably rather basic.

The story aims to encourage other people who aren't as savvy as our regular forum users by showing them it's not so difficult to do.

Andrea

innovate

Oh dear, what's happening with the MSE News articles. They used to be really good.

As has been stated by several others, this welsh chap is not anywhere near a savvy as dozens of others on (and off) MSE forums. To pick on example: having all this money and have some of it lose value on a daily basis in a Santander 1.25% account is nothing short of un-savvy, to put it kindly. There is a whole bunch of savings accounts that pay a lot more than this, not to talk about the current account alternatives.

Of course, the principle of picking the best offers, moving your money to other accounts/banks when required, and exploiting as many of the available offers as possible is completely sound. Anyone half-savvy will long have figured this out, and will have been exploiting the possible avenues as best as they could.

Gromitt

My first thought was: I wonder if this news is fictional to drum up some affiliate links that they hope people will click on thinking "I'll have some of that".

If he is real then he's not that savvy, a lot of us knew rates were plummeting and opened accounts in advance (such as Tesco 2.6%, Nationwide 2.95% and Halifax 2.8%) last year to last us through this year, and then grabbed the poor performing (at the time) Nationwide Loyalty Saver, which is now one of the leading accounts, offering 2.3%+ for loyal Nationwide customers.

innovate

parknook wrote: »

Would this work or have the banks cottoned onto this one?

Reaper wrote: »

It works as long as the money comes from external accounts, not other accounts with the same bank.

Not true for many accounts. But it might be simpler to set it up so the money does come from a different financial institution always.

parknook: increasingly, we seem to need Direct Debits of various sorts, and sometimes even use account switcher services, in order to get at the benefits. However, none of the currently available offerings has been out of bounds of the determined best-deal chasers. There are a fair number of threads on here that have a lot of detail about individual offerings.