Natwest digital regular saver - what to do after saving £1000

OceanSound

flaneurs_lobster said:

OceanSound said:

Bridlington1 said:

pecunianonolet said:

What I am interested in is the YouGov way of making extra money. @Bridlington1 would you be able to explain how long it takes for them to pay out? Are you not concerned that a lot of personal data is shared? Not sure if I want to link all my accounts, credit cards and saving accounts and maybe only go with dummy accounts. 

Essentially you open a YouGov account, then you sign into YouGov finance with those details. YouGov finance will then give you 500 YouGov points for each current account/credit card and 100 YouGov points for each savings account you link to them using open banking. 5000 YouGov points can be redeemed for £50 which can be paid into your bank account so it's effectively £5 per current account/credit card and £1 per savings account.  I've found points appear within a day normally and once redeemed the money arrived in your bank account within a couple of days.

YouGov then analyse your data. The whole point is to analyse consumer behaviour, so shopping patterns and that sort of thing for marketing purposes and is meant to compliment the YouGov surveys that people do. I personally do not link my main accounts, but do link the others and credit cards. 

The one thing you will need to watch out for is that they will only give points for accounts deemed as "active accounts". The word active gets defined as "Active accounts are your open GBP account(s) with regular bank transactions"and they do not tell you how regular they want the regular transactions to be. They gave me the points for 7 of the 10 current accounts I tried linking last week however so I imagine it's fairly broad.

One of the advantages of this scheme though is that the accounts are only linked for 90 days before the connection expires. Once the connection has expired you can then relink the accounts to get the points again.

I only discovered this scheme last week so am still unsure as to how many accounts they will give you points for. As a result I am opening extra current accounts, then bouncing money through them for about 3-4 weeks in an attempt to make the accounts appear "active".  I opened another 5 current accounts (Lloyds, Halifax, Bank of Scotland, RBS & Natwest) the other day and shall gradually keep opening more for the time being. I've had £50 out of them so far so either way it will be worth at least £200/yr to me.

I shall then link them en masse (probably by the end of the month) so shall update you with results. 

For details see:
https://yougov.zendesk.com/hc/en-gb/sections/4413107645841-YouGov-Finance

Any update on this?

The YouGov Finance bribe? A whole thread to itself here

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/6416681/yougov-finance-bribe/p1

Thanks.

Just wondering, as it is, I'd be a bit odd to put a link to the post I replied to in the above thread and ask 'any update on this?' some platforms get round this by allowing fancy pants methods like 'cross-posting'. Pretty sure MSE forum doesn't have this feature.

Anyway, I've gone through that thread and it doesn't have the particular answer to the question I was pondering, which is, if it's best to add accounts en-mass or add one by one. With en-masse, if some accounts do not qualify (due to low activity or what not) then there is no way of knowing which accounts didn't qualify. With one by one, we can know this, if the points don't show up in a couple of days. 

I'll try and ask the question above in that thread too.

PJHilder

Do NS&I debit card roundups show immediately? Just did one for £1.01 and the 99p is still showing in my Natwest account with no roundups.

OceanSound

PJHilder said:

Do NS&I debit card roundups show immediately? Just did one for £1.01 and the 99p is still showing in my Natwest account with no roundups.

No round up will show immediately (on NatWest and RBs - unlike Chase). They take one or two Business days to show up.

surreysaver

PJHilder said:

Do NS&I debit card roundups show immediately? Just did one for £1.01 and the 99p is still showing in my Natwest account with no roundups.

Do double roundups and £1.98 will appear in your Digital Saver in a couple of days 

surreysaver

35har1old said:

OceanSound said:

Just wondering what everyone's doing after hitting the £1000 threshold for the higher interest rate. Anything over £1000 is accruing peanuts in interest. 

So, do you wait for the standing order (or if you pay manually, deposit the money) then immediately take it out to put elsewhere (where it pays a higher interest)?

Limit Increased to £5000 a few weeks back. You can now round up debit card payments to the nearest pound and you can double this up And it does not count towards your monthly max amount. When you are near the £5000 mark say £4950 reduce your SO to £1 

Don't need to do that. Just cancel the Standing Order when you get to £5k, and syphon out the interest each month 

pecunianonolet

35har1old said:

pecunianonolet said:

Round ups usually appear by 2:30am after they have completed their daily service between 1:55 and 2:30am. So funds should be in by 1:55 am. This allows to transfer in at 00:01 am so you can get interest credited for the previous day elsewhere. In the morning after you get up you can move any "left over" cash back to your savings account and repear the following night so money never sits in 0% current counts. Works for RBS and Natwest in the same way.

Thought the round ups went directly to the savings account

They usually do when the payment has been processed. So Paypal for example isn't the fastest provider in taking the DD so I get the round ups into the saving account 2-3 days, longer if a weekend in between, after the transaction date. Could result in getting £500 in round ups on a Monday.

surreysaver

pecunianonolet said:

35har1old said:

pecunianonolet said:

Round ups usually appear by 2:30am after they have completed their daily service between 1:55 and 2:30am. So funds should be in by 1:55 am. This allows to transfer in at 00:01 am so you can get interest credited for the previous day elsewhere. In the morning after you get up you can move any "left over" cash back to your savings account and repear the following night so money never sits in 0% current counts. Works for RBS and Natwest in the same way.

Thought the round ups went directly to the savings account

They usually do when the payment has been processed. So Paypal for example isn't the fastest provider in taking the DD so I get the round ups into the saving account 2-3 days, longer if a weekend in between, after the transaction date. Could result in getting £500 in round ups on a Monday.

I thought they only rounded up payments by debit card?

pecunianonolet

surreysaver said:

pecunianonolet said:

35har1old said:

pecunianonolet said:

Round ups usually appear by 2:30am after they have completed their daily service between 1:55 and 2:30am. So funds should be in by 1:55 am. This allows to transfer in at 00:01 am so you can get interest credited for the previous day elsewhere. In the morning after you get up you can move any "left over" cash back to your savings account and repear the following night so money never sits in 0% current counts. Works for RBS and Natwest in the same way.

Thought the round ups went directly to the savings account

They usually do when the payment has been processed. So Paypal for example isn't the fastest provider in taking the DD so I get the round ups into the saving account 2-3 days, longer if a weekend in between, after the transaction date. Could result in getting £500 in round ups on a Monday.

I thought they only rounded up payments by debit card?

Yes, and you can use Paypal for that. Just link the debit card and make a friends and family paymet (no fees). I make 99 x 0.01 transactions and that get me 99 x 1.98 in round ups with double round up activated. 

artyboy

Just noticed that the interest rate has gone up to 6.17% (AER) - maybe I ought to have a go at roundups after all...

Middle_of_the_Road

artyboy said:

Just noticed that the interest rate has gone up to 6.17% (AER) - maybe I ought to have a go at roundups after all...

Activated roundups yesterday, just for normal spending. Not sure about doing the multi-micro payments though. quite an intensive process by the sound of it.