The Top Easy Access Savings Discussion Area

1Foz

Ha ha I walked in with my shorts and converse luckily this branch in Bmouth is tiny, not even a chair to sit on while waiting...they had a water machine tho (no coffee). Maybe they heard I was coming Had to make an appointment to open the account tho as one person left running the place alone so no time for her to complete an account opening today , which was annoying seeing as it (was) still August . Not that it matters, this account looks good for easy access. Yeah Shane reg saver rates and fixed rates are kinda merging together. How bad is this tho, I even parked a mile away so I wouldn't have to pay to park down there lol. £2.50 per hour...sod that !

murphydavid

Lost track a bit but £100 invested (in and out) at 3% pa is a 25P a month return. If that's what your doing. Hardly worth stooping down to pick it up. A miles walk is good exercise though!

1Foz

murphydavid wrote: »

Lost track a bit but £100 invested (in and out) at 3% pa is a 25P a month return. If that's what your doing. Hardly worth stooping down to pick it up. A miles walk is good exercise though!

Not in/out...it'll grow £100 each month...and in New Year when my First Direct and Nationwide Regular savers mature I'll have some money to drip feed to it aswell (about half of the 3,000 from Nationwide since I need to keep some back to pay Road Tax, Insurance and MOT in March! First Direct one goes to LISA account (with £400 from nationwide). Then I open new ones and start again (M+S one tho instead of nationwide, unless they miraculously reinstate their RS).

So, over a year, I'll expect to get up to about £2000 ish into the Virgin account. Just not a great deal in the next few months. £30-£35 ish interest at a rough guess. Its not bad. Way I look at it, the spare money I save covers my car expenses...its not really a saving to make money, just to make the new year less bothersome

abz88

Coventry easy access ISA account now better than standard savings accounts, is this a trend that other ISA providers will likely follow and with better rates, or is this a something Coventry do as a type of USP (believe it was Coventry that brought out a 1.5% ISA when Marcus was still at 1.5% as well)?

DragonQ

1.5% but it takes a day or more to withdraw money, so not that helpful as a holding account for savings you want to shovel into regular savers, etc.

S_and_J

On the moneysavingexpert savings-accounts-best-interest page, listed under "The best five-year fixed rates", there's United Bank UK with an AER of 2.36%. Looks good, but if you go to the bank's webpage for Fixed Term Deposits and look under "What would the estimated balance be at the end of the selected term based on the minimum required deposit?" on the bank website, you find that the return on a deposit of £2000 after five years is £2236. The website says that this is for an AER of 2.36%, but according to my calculations if it was 2.36%, after five years the balance should be just over £2247. £2236 is what you'd get if the AER was 2.26%.
Am I missing something?

eskbanker

S_and_J wrote: »

On the moneysavingexpert savings-accounts-best-interest page, listed under "The best five-year fixed rates", there's United Bank UK with an AER of 2.36%. Looks good, but if you go to the bank's webpage for Fixed Term Deposits and look under "What would the estimated balance be at the end of the selected term based on the minimum required deposit?" on the bank website, you find that the return on a deposit of £2000 after five years is £2236. The website says that this is for an AER of 2.36%, but according to my calculations if it was 2.36%, after five years the balance should be just over £2247. £2236 is what you'd get if the AER was 2.26%.
Am I missing something?

Yes, you're missing the fact that they don't compound interest in the usual way, as explained at https://www.ubluk.com/personal-banking/products-and-services/personal-savings-accounts/fixed-term-deposits/:

IMPORTANT NOTICE: UBL UK does not compound interest and interest is not added to your principal amount on any selected interest payment frequency.

so 2.36% annually on £2,000 for five years is no more than £236 when not adding the interest to the account each year.

Chordeiles

I tried to open an ICICI account a few years ago and gave up (they seemed so incompetent I was starting to lose the will to live !). I recall that at the same time the Nottingham Building Society effectively turned me away by having an ID verification process that seemed impossible to satisfy. In the event RCI bank got the money and I've been extremely happy with them. But RCI is not the top easy access account in late 2019.

So today I opened a Marcus account. Application form has a way of looking up your address from the postcode and then offering you a drop-down box for you to choose which number on the street you are. Drop-down box had perfect address information but that was not what got auto-filled on their application form ! Had omitted what is sometimes called the second line of the address, sometimes called "district", and at my address that does often cause problems, as there are multiple instances of the name of my street within the same "postal town" region. Never mind, was able to correct manually, but a poor first impression. Otherwise all went well and was able to deposit a trial amount to the account that was fairly soon showing there.

Now Marcus exclude joint accounts, so a few minutes later my wife was trying to open a similar account. Same issue with the address, easily fixed. But whereas I was asked for no ID, in my wife's case they wanted two types of ID to be uploaded. And many hours later her account has still not opened. My guess is that it choked when it saw a second customer at the same address, or with the same "linked account".

Called Marcus, mainly to advise them that their auto-address finder was flawed, but also to ask if two accounts with same address and linked account are a problem. Call was answered but silent. Well not quite silent, sounds of a call centre in the background, plus occasional sound of someone moving the telephone handset around their desk. So the poor first impression is fully reinforced now, and I'm wondering whether to bother with Marcus !

In a huge contrast, my wife had closed a Virgin account more than three years ago (as RCI were offering better interest at that time), yet her login still worked and from there it was very easy to open a "Double Take e-saver", including making it a joint account and creating a new login for myself. So there is already money in the Virgin account that might have been in Marcus.

The MSE savings page has a small write-up on "Raisin" but I'd note that Hargreaves Lansdown have a very similar product called "Active Savings". We had joined this last week as one of the accounts within it was the BLME 1 year fix at 1.9%, which suited us very well. But now we want to add some more there are few accounts there to tempt us. The BLME 1 year fix has been replaced by a BLME 6 month fix which might be exclusive to HL Active Savings but isn't that tempting. So we will end up going direct to BLME for more fixed-term savings, and it feels like the "Active Savings" route has been a waste of time (except we did grab 2 x the £25 joining incentive whilst it was on offer !).

I-LOV-MONEY

I signed up to Marcus about a year or so ago, I can't remember what information I had to provide them. I wanted to set up a joint account because I had an account, my wife had an account and there is 'joint money' which is usued for bills etc,



What I did is to put the money into one account, and then kept a separate record on an Excel of how much belonged to each!


The only annoying thing I find about Marcus, is if you want to arrange to withdraw / transfer money after 23:00 it doesn't deal with it until the next day. Also weekends are very slow.

adindas

Virgin Money double Take E-Saver & Man Utd Double Take E-Saver
I am aware it is not as good as Marcus or Al Rayan (before the interest was dropped). However, if you already have both Marcus or Al Rayan saving accounts, it is probably good as a backup in case the interest rate of Marcus & AR drop again.

It Just needs £1 to maintain it.
Variable rate of: 1.45%

It is not fully easy access but it allow Up to 2 fee free withdrawals per calendar year. Once you make a withdrawal, you could just close it and open a new one again to refresh 2 withdrawals per calendar year.

It is painless process to Open this account if you already have a VM account. In addition, FPI / FPO with virgin money to other banks is almost instant.