joint savings account with good interest

purple_butterfly28

Hi All
Not sure if anyone can give me any advice or their own experience.
Myself and OH got married fairly recently and were given quite a few checks in join married name.
They add up to a fairly substantial amount and we would like to put them in a joint savings account with a good rate of interest.
My OH does not want to do a joint current account and having lived together for 5 years and all the bills are shared between our individual current accounts already with DD's set up etc there is no need for this really.

Just wondering if anyone knows of a savings account you can have jointly that gives you reasonable interest, though you don't need to set up a current account for as well.

Unfortunately I know the best places are ISA's and stocks and shares however, I need to get these cheques into an account in joint names as our banks won't take them for individual names.

We ultimately want to use this savings account to put some money in each month (approx. £200-£300 each) to save towards a house. Not too much though as we also want to be able to save into the help to buy ISA scheme when it is launched, plus already have some stocks and shares ISA savings.

Any and all advice will be considered TIA

AndyT678

It will depend on what a "fairly substantial" amount of money is but it's likely that your best options depend on current account(s). For some people it would mean £500, for others £50,000. It would help to know more precisely.

Note that you can just open a 2nd or 3rd current account without changing anything about your existing accounts and DDs etc... Just think of them as bank accounts not "current" accounts and "savings" accounts.

There are current accounts paying up to 5% and regular savers paying 6% which you need a current account to access.

Granted it's a bit of a faff but 4 - 6% is better than the 1.5%ish that you might get otherwise.

There are loads of detailed posts on all the options available if you search the forum.

mvarrier

Are you sure the bank won't take them? If you just pay them in to the automated machine, no-one in the bank will query the name. You can try with one of the small cheques first.

(I used to work in cheque clearing at HSBC once upon a time...)

eskbanker

Simple standard savings accounts paying decent interest just don't exist at the moment, so it might be easiest just to open any old joint account solely for the purpose of paying in the cheques and then shifting the funds to wherever you ultimately want to, jointly or separately?

purple_butterfly28

Hi All
Thanks for replying
AndyT678 - it's £500 in cheques but we were also given some cash that could be put in taking it to approx. £800 I know it's not a huge amount really but it's a start on our saving towards a house goal.
mvarrier - unfortunately the FCA has now made rules a lot more stringent and the banks should not be taking in cheques that are not correctly named as per the bank account name (fraud and money laundering reasons). Lloyds and Halifax are definitely not willing to take them and I know from experience that they've spotted a cheque that was incorrectly made out before through the machines so don't want to risk that either.
esbanker - that's what I was starting to think but was hoping/seeing if anyone had heard of anything I hadn't spotted yet.
Currently think our best route is possibly the Nationwide "Save to buy issue 2" saving account, but need to find out if it can be held jointly.

AndyT678

purple_butterfly28 wrote: »

Currently think our best route is possibly the Nationwide "Save to buy issue 2" saving account, but need to find out if it can be held jointly.

It can have up to 4 account holders Save to buy but it still pays less than 1/2 of the interest that you could get in a Nationwide FlexDirect account.

colsten

purple_butterfly28 wrote: »

Currently think our best route is possibly the Nationwide "Save to buy issue 2" saving account, but need to find out if it can be held jointly.

It really depends on what your criteria for "best route" are, but there are alot more flexible accounts that pay over twice the amount of interest. There might obviously be a possibility for some cashback if you choose to have your mortgage with Nationwide in a few years time provided you meet the eligibility criteria, and if you take out your mortgage within 3 years. Only you can judge whether those ifs and buts are worth the low interest rate.