Natwest Roundups

TheBanker

eastcorkram said:

TheBanker said:

MorningcoffeeIV said:

It appears to send your spare cash to whatever savings account you have, which means the rate will vary.

Plus, no cashback.

Plus, it's Natwest.

You choose which Natwest savings account you want the money to go to. Logically you would choose the 6% Digital Regular Saver. Purely for roundups I agree it's a better proposition than Chase - firstly because you can earn a higher rate, secondly because the savings account doesn't re-set after a year, and thirdly because you can use double round ups to save twice as much money. On the other hand, Chase pay 1% cashback on the purchase too, so probably a better proposition overall.

But to be honest all of these round up products are a bit gimmicky. The actual amount you can save, and the interest it will generate, is negligible.  

Indeed. My round up with Chase had just reset, and totalled £236.50 for the year. I didn't artificially try to manipulate this at any time  It was paying 5%. I think from memory the interest came to £5.69. 

I've had my Chase account for a year (my Roundups are about to move back to the current account). I've not always used Chase for spending though as I've had other cashback cards and offers.

My Roundup balance is £135, including £4 of interest. It's better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, as my mum would say, but hardly a 'get rich quick' scheme! I've earned £50 of cashback on debit card spending (could have been more, if I'd used the card more), and now I'm earning a tiny bit of interest on the small current account balance. So overall not a bad proposition, especially as there's no account fee. The Roundups wouldn't incentivise me to open this account, but given I have it for the cashback I might as well use them.

A nice extra feature would be if they let you have the 1% cashback automatically credited either your current or savings account, rather than having to manually transfer it.

redux

35har1old said:

TheBanker said:

MorningcoffeeIV said:

It appears to send your spare cash to whatever savings account you have, which means the rate will vary.

Plus, no cashback.

Plus, it's Natwest.

You choose which Natwest savings account you want the money to go to. Logically you would choose the 6% Digital Regular Saver. Purely for roundups I agree it's a better proposition than Chase - firstly because you can earn a higher rate, secondly because the savings account doesn't re-set after a year, and thirdly because you can use double round ups to save twice as much money. On the other hand, Chase pay 1% cashback on the purchase too, so probably a better proposition overall.

But to be honest all of these round up products are a bit gimmicky. The actual amount you can save, and the interest it will generate, is negligible.  

In previous Post it was suggested that you could achieve the £5000 limit within a month

There must be any number of ways.

Just sit in a pub every evening, and buy everybody's drinks for the first 2 or 3 hours

TheBanker

redux said:

35har1old said:

TheBanker said:

MorningcoffeeIV said:

It appears to send your spare cash to whatever savings account you have, which means the rate will vary.

Plus, no cashback.

Plus, it's Natwest.

You choose which Natwest savings account you want the money to go to. Logically you would choose the 6% Digital Regular Saver. Purely for roundups I agree it's a better proposition than Chase - firstly because you can earn a higher rate, secondly because the savings account doesn't re-set after a year, and thirdly because you can use double round ups to save twice as much money. On the other hand, Chase pay 1% cashback on the purchase too, so probably a better proposition overall.

But to be honest all of these round up products are a bit gimmicky. The actual amount you can save, and the interest it will generate, is negligible.  

In previous Post it was suggested that you could achieve the £5000 limit within a month

There must be any number of ways.

Just sit in a pub every evening, and buy everybody's drinks for the first 2 or 3 hours

If you could persuade the barman to make each transaction be £x.01 and you bought eighty drinks in separate transactions, and repeated that every day of the month, then yes you would get £5k into the Regular Saver. You'd also make lots of new friends but you'd spend far more buying drinks than the Regular Saver would generate in interest! I expect the pub landlord would be happy though - he might even give you a free bag of pork scratchings! 

Daniel_John_Hurley

If a transaction gets refunded later is the roundup reversed I wonder?

I'm not thinking about cheeky and paying with the Natwest card via Curve and then going back in time and charging the transactions to Chase. Nothing like that at all.

Compo23

It isn't auto-refunded in my experience if the underlying transaction is refunded.

Whether it's manually moved back later on is another matter, has only been a month - but I'd suggest it shouldn't be - even with large numbers.

You chose to round up on the valid and authorised debit card transaction - just because it's refunded doesn't mean they should take money out of savings (and nothing in the T&Cs suggests it).

They may well try it, particularly if large numbers are being generated - but I'll go to FOS (got spare time on my hands!) so they might just leave me to it rather than deal with the paperwork & fees.

Really as others have said it's negligible, although with Curve and compound interest I can imagine it'll knock maybe say 6 months off getting to £5k (assuming no ridiculous gaming of the system). Whether they still have the same rates/rules/processes & limits in place at that point in time is another matter!!!

Daniel_John_Hurley

I think it would knock more than 6 months off if you use double roundups, even without ridiculous gaming.

LavenderLamb101

I'm confused by all this, it says you can only pay in £150 max a month. So really if you pay this in on the 1st you can't use round ups.

ForumUser7

LavenderLamb101 said:

I'm confused by all this, it says you can only pay in £150 max a month. So really if you pay this in on the 1st you can't use round ups.

'Are Round Ups included in the maximum I can deposit each month?' 'No, any money added from Round Ups won't count towards your £150 limit' ~ https://www.natwest.com/savings/digital-regular-saver.html FAQs

pecunianonolet

Achieved it with both, Natwest and RBS, in around 5 weeks in December/Jan. Moved all out early April to put in an ISA. OH started 3 weeks ago (not as determined as I was to get my 99 transactions with each done a day) and is already at around 3.5k with each account. Only got blocked by Natwest or RMS, can't remember once or twice and a text to respond Y or N to autorise the payment so got it unblocked in under 30 sec. No blocking with Paypal for me and OH was asked to provide ID info to Paypal the other day but no blockage and all working fine. We might be lucky, i think others had problems. 

Spread out the transactions over the day/ evening with both, don't do all in one sitting. 

Stargunner

pecunianonolet said:

Achieved it with both, Natwest and RBS, in around 5 weeks in December/Jan. Moved all out early April to put in an ISA. OH started 3 weeks ago (not as determined as I was to get my 99 transactions with each done a day) and is already at around 3.5k with each account. Only got blocked by Natwest or RMS, can't remember once or twice and a text to respond Y or N to autorise the payment so got it unblocked in under 30 sec. No blocking with Paypal for me and OH was asked to provide ID info to Paypal the other day but no blockage and all working fine. We might be lucky, i think others had problems. 

Spread out the transactions over the day/ evening with both, don't do all in one sitting. 

That is a hell of a lot of time and effort to get 3 months worth of interest at a higher rate than if you had of left it in a easy access saver, to then transfer the whole lot out.