Regular Savings Accounts: The Best Currently Available List!

Wheres_My_Cashback

Descrabled said:

RBS/NatWest

The gain or loss over 2 days of £150 at 6% = 5p.

Club Lloyds

The interest over 2 days of £400 at 6.25% = 14p

Coventry FHS1

The interest over 2 days of £1k at 5% = 27p > Now that's worth the effort!

But in reality those figures are not the gain/loss as there is no account of the difference between what rates those funds are earning in their feeder accounts and here. So in reality it's probably more in the region of....

2p / 8p / 20p and annually approx  14p / 35p / 1.40

Bridlington1

OceanSound said:

Bridlington1 said:

It's manual transfers and a spreadsheet for me, the only exceptions being HSBC's regular saver and the Ecology regular saver (DD). I paid manually into 27 regular savers yesterday afternoon, and will be paying into another regular saver later in the month by manual transfer.

I personally would rather do things manually myself largely because I do not want to have to faff around with setting up SOs then needing to cancel them when the regular savers mature/get closed. I would also rather avoid having money sat in a current account earning no interest overnight as I do not have anywhere near a big enough OD limit to cover all the regular savers.

Plus if I am unfortunate enough to end up with a payment from my EA account held up for whatever reason I do not want to find myself having to take money out of the regular savers I've just paid into to avoid paying 40% on an arranged OD. At least with manual transfers if an EA payment is held up by a few days the worst that'll happen is I'll be paying into my regular savers a few days late, with SOs it could become a real pain as some will take me into unarranged ODs, others will bounce etc

How do you mean (the bit highlighted above)? The two parts seem to contradict each other. 

Not all current accounts earn no interest. Club Lloyd's is a case in point.

Yesterday I deposited a total of £9685 into 27 of my regular savers. I do not have anywhere near a high enough OD limit across all of my accounts to cover that amount.

I can't open a Chase current account as the app isn't compatible with my smartphone, VM only pays 2% on up to £1k and I gave up on opening Kroo as I couldn't get them to recognise my passport (I gave up after 3 dozen attempts). LBG only pay the interest on up to £5k and even then you need to have 2 DDs on the account to get the interest and those DDs could be better redeployed elsewhere.

Even by using a feeder account such as Santander's NLA limited edition e-saver (3.25%) I would still suffer a small loss of interest versus doing everything manually so it doesn't seem worth the hassle IMHO.

Plus doing everything manually only took me around 20 mins yesterday and like @flaneurs_lobster I would probably spend just as much time checking on my SOs each month as I currently spend making my deposits manually so there doesn't seem much point to me. 

Wheres_My_Cashback

OceanSound said:

Yes, I'm not a fan of using SO's for feeding RS's either. Remember having a discussion about this some time ago with a forumite, and he had a chain of SO's even accounting for bank holidays and such so the SO's would deduct a few days before the 'due date' even during normal months (months without bank holidays). Used to swear by his system and seemed he had everything down to a T (apart from a bit of interest lost due to SO's deducting earlier than usual - here it would depend on the sums involved and number of RS's).  I guess it's what works best for you. 

S/O will never deduct before the due date, though DDs can and will do that with some.

Nick_C

Chase and Kroo are excellent feeder accounts, paying 3.1%  (from tomorrow) or 3.33% respectively. 

Nick_C

Bridlington1 said:

I personally would rather do things manually myself largely because I do not want to have to faff around with setting up SOs then needing to cancel them when the regular savers mature/get closed.

You can set the number of payments or final payment date when setting up a SO.  The only additional maintenance is if you close an account early, but cancelling a SO is quick and simple. 

gt94sss2

Bridlington1 said:

I personally would rather do things manually myself largely because I do not want to have to faff around with setting up SOs then needing to cancel them when the regular savers mature/get closed.

You can set a standing order to automatically expire after a set number of payments/on a certain date - no need to manually cancel them.

Also, most bank accounts charge no overdraft fees if you are in credit but the end of the working day + try more than once to take a payment.

As such, I often receive a text message saying I am overdrawn on the day my standing orders start to go out.. with the remainder going once I have topped up my account.

clivep

I feed our regular savers from a Bank of Scotland a/c. I manually pay into this BOS a/c on the last day of the month with the SOs scheduled for the 1st. It loses a bit of interest but is more convenient and at least the BOS a/c does pay some interest.

The BOS a/c has a useful feature to view upcoming payments. I've just noticed that the payment to the NatWest regular saver that should be paid tomorrow is missing and no longer shows up in my list of SOs. I've not cancelled it so I've no idea what's happened there.

Doh! Just realised that the SO was set up when the high interest rate was only paid on £1,000 so I had put an end date on the SO to make sure I didn't overpay.

Eco_Miser

Wheres_My_Cashback said:

OceanSound said:

Yes, I'm not a fan of using SO's for feeding RS's either. Remember having a discussion about this some time ago with a forumite, and he had a chain of SO's even accounting for bank holidays and such so the SO's would deduct a few days before the 'due date' even during normal months (months without bank holidays). Used to swear by his system and seemed he had everything down to a T (apart from a bit of interest lost due to SO's deducting earlier than usual - here it would depend on the sums involved and number of RS's).  I guess it's what works best for you. 

S/O will never deduct before the due date, though DDs can and will do that with some.

I believe OceanSound meant that the SOs are set to deduct a few days before the funds are required in the destination account, so that even when they are delayed by Good Friday and Easter Monday and the intervening weekend, they still arrive at the destination in time.

Wheres_My_Cashback

Eco_Miser said:

Wheres_My_Cashback said:

OceanSound said:

Yes, I'm not a fan of using SO's for feeding RS's either. Remember having a discussion about this some time ago with a forumite, and he had a chain of SO's even accounting for bank holidays and such so the SO's would deduct a few days before the 'due date' even during normal months (months without bank holidays). Used to swear by his system and seemed he had everything down to a T (apart from a bit of interest lost due to SO's deducting earlier than usual - here it would depend on the sums involved and number of RS's).  I guess it's what works best for you. 

S/O will never deduct before the due date, though DDs can and will do that with some.

I believe OceanSound meant that the SOs are set to deduct a few days before the funds are required in the destination account, so that even when they are delayed by Good Friday and Easter Monday and the intervening weekend, they still arrive at the destination in time.

The SO process starts at the time funds are attempted to be sent, usually in the early hours of the set date. If no funds SO fails, but will be attempted to be taken automatically later in the day.

The DD process does start before the set date and is very different as it's a 5 day process. Funds will be taken even if there are no available funds. Then later in the day if still no funds in the account the DD will be reversed and fail.

pookey

flaneurs_lobster said:

pookey said:

flaneurs_lobster said:

ForumUser7 said:

liamcov said:

Re regular savers like Lloyds, BOS, NatWest, RBS - do you have a SO set up for 1st of the month (which when it falls on a weekend doesn’t transfer until the Monday) or is it possible to do a manual transfer into them so you know the money goes in on the 1st?

I hold the Lloyds MS, BoS MS, NatWest DRS and RBS DRS (among others). I pay into all manually with no SOs set up. IIRC, I had to cancel the NatWest and RBS SOs as these were automatically set up

I've got a dozen regular savings a/cs, plus some reward accounts that need funds flushed through them. Tried for a couple of months to get SOs in place to auto fund them all. 

All went to ratpoop over xmas/new year. Given up and now do everything manually, took about an hour this morning. Quite cathartic. 

Wow, that's very good dedication. I need to be more stricter and get in on this method 😊

A spreadsheet is definitely your friend. 

That's a very good idea thanks