Easy savings Account and Moving money around

298j

Hello everyone 

With so many easy access online savings accounts that they constantly change their ratings, it sounds a good idea to move our money around in order to achieve the maximum interest rate.

Eg current account might be giving 2.1% while another one gives you 2.55% 

The question is:

Can you move around your money every now and then?
Is there any case that a bank or an institution might consider this as "criminal" activity and block you from your money?

I mean you have savings in Account A. 
Account b increases the rate. You move your savings to B.
Next month though Account C increases more. You move to C.
Then A, missing on competition, increases again. 

What is the deal with that?

I am asking because I have read many cases where banks decided to "freeze" accounts with no apparent reason.


Thanks 

PS: (Apparently I don't know that's why I am asking all of you savvy people out there!)

mebu60

Can you move around your money every now and then?

Many on here are doing this continuously in the current environment. 

Many also leave a token £1 in old accounts to facilitate the return. 

No crime in being a 'rate tart'. Financial institutions do freeze accounts for various reasons but the number of times that happens per millions of successful transactions is very small. You will read about the former, never the latter. 

refluxer

Yes, there's no reason why you can't move money freely between different savings accounts to get the best rates. I don't personally open new savings accounts for every tiny rate increase, but I do have a number of accounts with banks who are regularly in the top tables (eg. Atom, Ford Money, Zopa etc) and move money between them according to whoever has the highest rate at the time, occasionally adding a new one to the list if the rate offered is significantly higher than the competition (eg. when Santander launched the eSaver @ 2.75% last month). Although not exclusively, I do tend to favour the banks who increase the rates on existing accounts (rather than release new issues) as this minimises the hassle and frequency of opening new accounts.

You mentioned transactions being blocked ? One way to minimise this is to move your money via a single, reliable current account. This is often actually a necessity anyway, as many of the top-paying savings accounts require you to pay money in and out via a nominated account. Once you've made a number of payments into each of your savings accounts, the frequency of transactions being stopped (due to what the bank suspects as fraudulent activity) should decrease - at least that's my experience with my current account, although some banks can be more awkward than others judging by posts here on that subject. I almost never get payments to my savings accounts blocked these days - it only tends to occur when making the first few, large payments into a newly-opened account.